Dear Eclipse Committers
Gaining a good understanding of how and what people use in Eclipse has
always been a challenge. For this reason, the Eclipse Foundation has taken
the initiative to create an Eclipse Usage Data Collector (UDC).
The idea of the Eclipse usage data collector is to record what and how
developers use Eclipse. The current version of the collector
records activations of the workbench, bundle starts, activations and
deactivations of views, editors, and perspectives, and invocations of commands.
Information captured includes the id of the source element, symbolic name and
version of the bundle that defines the element, and the time that the event occurs.
At regular intervals and with the user’s permission, the collector
will send the usage information to a server at the Eclipse Foundation.
We will then use this data to create usage reports.
Of course with any technology that tracks user behavior, privacy is
always a concern. To address these concerns we have 1) ensured that
all the data is submitted anonymously and 2) users need to specifically opt-in
to providing the data. The complete terms of use can be found in
the attached document.
The plan is to include the usage data collector in the packages created
by the Eclipse Packaging Project
(EPP). The code for the usage data collector will become part of
the EPP project. EPP has already created a version of the Ganymede M4 packages that
include a beta of the usage data collector.
We would like to request your assistance in two areas of this
project. 1) Please take the time to download a package that
includes the usage data collector and start running the monitor in your own
workspace. You can access the packages here or load the usage monitor from this
update site. 2) We expect the committer community to be one of the main users
of this information. Therefore, we would like to get your feedback and
ideas on what type of reports and information you would find useful. Please
feel free to open bugzilla request on the UDC component in the EPP project.
Thanks in advanced for your help and I look forward to your feedback.
Ian
Ian Skerrett
Director of Marketing
Eclipse Foundation
613-224-9461 ext. 227
blog: ianskerrett.wordpress.com