Hacker News Reader

Comment by benjaminpv | Hacker News Reader

I've spent a lot of time excising built-in, uninstallable plugins from Kepler so I definitely find myself agreeing with this.

I won't bemoan free software and when Eclipse works it's great but boy howdy could it do with a Mozilla->Phoenix/Firefox style split where a lot of the things that are integrated into the base install (are there really people using things like Mylyn?) are removed, leaving just the bare IDE.

View on HN

The really obnoxious thing about the plugins is that they are (as you mentioned) friggin' uninstallable and cannot even be disabled (aka prevented from loading). Why? Who thought that was a good idea?

This was a big regression for me when the super-annoying Git plugin was bundled with Eclipse -- having to manually remove bundles from the installation directory is not a lot of fun nor a very robust method of plugin uninstallation. :(

EDIT: I will of course try this release, but I predict that I'll be sticking with IDEA.

I use Mylyn at work to link Eclipse with JIRA using the Atlassian connector. I can interact with JIRA without leaving Eclipse if I want.

Why not go with a minimal install?

Eclipse Platform and JDT runtime binaries do the trick here. Add-on must-have plugins as needed. Eclipse Standard has a whole bunch o' kitchen sink...

Where would one download those?

from the drops[1]

[1] http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops4/R-4.4-2...

It's not even obvious from this page that this download is a "minimal" install.

OK, thanks. Will give those a try later on!

They've done a lot of this with their "packages"; if you download e.g. "Eclipse IDE for Java Developers" then it includes a lot less than the "default" version (though admittedly Mylyn is still included).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com