[epp-dev] Proposal: Customize Default Preferences for Packages

[Gunnar Wagenknecht <gunnar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetinge Noble Package Maintainers,

I'd like to propose that we introduce default preferences for Eclipse packages which are different from the default of the legacy Eclipse SDK zip. My motivations for this proposal are usability optimizations to the large user base of the packages.

One of the first settings to change would be:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=191154
+ auto-refresh enabled by default

For the sake of this proposal I don't like to discuss the specific changes in detail. My main interest is to get a vote/opinion from package maintainers if they are interested in this proposal or if there are arguments for not doing it.

Although it's possible to change defaults in the place they are defined (eg. platform or JDT or CDT), any change at such a low level may cause quite a significant impact for *any* downstream consumer. It is expected, that most consumers of the low level artifacts are adaptors and other projects. However, the main consumer of the Eclipse packages is the Eclipse user base which is also the main target group for a different default setting. Thus, I think it's a perfectly valid to ship packages with defaults optimized for our users leaving projects the freedom to ship defaults convenient for a project, their adopters or their committers.

Please comment.

-Gunnar

-- 
Gunnar Wagenknecht
gunnar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx