| [News.eclipse.technology.packaging] Re: Welcome to eclipse.technology.packaging |
Ed,
Great that you are interested. We will follow up.
Jochen
I think this is a great idea, especially the part about native installers. You can put me down as an interested party.
An install program could make the package size much smaller by using pack200 or other compression techniques, and help eliminate one of the complaints often heard about Eclipse (it's too big).
Also an install program could look to see what JRE you have, make sure it's a good enough version, and add VM specific options, for example to increase the max permgen size.
It could also do things like set up file associations to support double-clicking on a file in the Explorer/Finder and tickling Eclipse to open that file (starting Eclipse if necessary). And it could set update sites and auto-update policies.
Another thing you could do is create an installer for "The Eclipse Rich Client Platform" that could be reused by all Eclipse-based applications, including the IDE. We do that at SAS to avoid re-shipping those bits in every product. It works kind of like the Microsoft .NET Framework installer. (A .NET program requires a certain version of the Framework to be installed first, and thus every .NET program doesn't have to include the Framework.) Programs and frameworks can also be distributed on different schedules if you're careful about backwards compatibility or can do side-by-side installs.
--Ed