[News.eclipse.technology.packaging] Re: Downloads page is confusing - qu

[Markus Knauer <mknauer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Kevin,

that's what I like to hear... in fact, these are the first comments on those
download pages. Well, I would have preferred something like... hey,
everything looks pretty good. But at least there are many suggestions on
how to improve the pages. Thanks.

See my comments in the text below.

Markus




Kevin McGuire wrote:

> Hi guys,
> 
> I'd like to be a good sport and try out the EPP projects because I think
>   they're a great idea.  But I find the EPP downloads page
> http://www.eclipse.org/epp/download.php
> confusing and I couldn't actually download what I was expecting I could.
> 
> Some comments:
> 
> 1) Should be organized by project:
> 
> The reason that I went to this page is not that I care about every EPP,
> but that I care about a particular one. In this case, I was referred
> here by the webtools 3.4 M5 page
>
http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/downloads/drops/R3.0/S-3.0M5-20080218021547/
> that asks if folks could please try out the EPP project occassionally.

Cool. 
I didn't know that they already have a link to the EPP pages.


> The resulting EPP page thus confused me initially because I was
> confronted with a table with build IDs along the top.  I'd suggest that
> there be a different build/download page for each packaging project to
> focus on the packaging the person cares about - less overwhealming and I
> could've been linked to the right spot from the webtools page.

Well, my thoughts when I created that page were quite different. I wanted to
create a page which allows to see the build status (red/green) at a first
glance.

=> I will talk with the webtools people and see what we can do. At least we
should clarify the meaning of this 'nightly build page' and the 'milestone
release page' (www.eclipse.org/epp/ganymede.php)


> 2) Couldn't find the download:
> 
> If I click in the table on the topmost "Success" for say JEE, or any of
> the other successes, I get what appears to be the build result script.
> Where's the actual download?

Correct. I knew that before, but I had no time to change that in the scripts
that re-generate the page content after every build.
The download itself is on a separate download page that is linked from the
build id. I have to admit that this is not really intuitive ;-)


> 3) Missing milestone granularity:
> 
> I really don't want to download a nightly build, what I'd like to
> download is something that represents a given milestone of the contained
> projects, just like I would for those individual projects.  That way
> there's at least a chance that it'll work, and there's something known
> to log bugs against. But the table only shows the last four autobuilds
> that only takes me back two days, and I didn't see an archive.

Yepp. You are right again - this is not clear on this page. As a quick fix
I've added a note on the top of that page that points to a location with
the 'stable' Ganymede milestone releases.

> So in total the page was a complete failure for me, which is a shame.

Let's try to change this!


> The more we can increase the consumability of this page, the more we can
> increase use of the packaging projects prior to GA, which seems a good
> thing.
> 
> Cheers,
> Kevin


Thanks again for the comments. I'll work on an improvement, but let us know
if you have more suggestions.

Markus