Description James Arlow 2011-02-16 15:05:09 EST

Build Identifier: n/a

The eclipse market place is alright.  Having an central internal extension manager is by no means a bad thing, but it seems a little disingenuous to have an install link in the eclipse market place that only points you to a tutorial on how to navigate your way to the real install link inside eclipse.  

It would make a lot more sense, from an end user standpoint, if the clicking the install link in a web browser initiated the install process through eclipse.  It would also make it simpler for IT workers and hobbyist to deploy  platform utilities/extensions that don't have a place in the market.

The most obvious roadblock to this, from my perspective, is that basic eclipse distributions, at least for windows, aren't registered as system applications and multiple copies may be present on the system at any one time.  The OS isn't given the info it needs to forward an extension install request.

Many, if not most users are only going to have one eclipse instance, or only use the most recent.  It would make sense then, as a default, to forward such requests to the last copy of eclipse that was run.  This could easily be managed in windows via a registry entry that is set when eclipse loads, and I'm sure a similar simple solution could be established for other platforms, if not a good platform agnostic one.  

The other issue is that the current software repositories use a normal http address scheme, so the OS cant identify an eclipse resources from a normal website.   In order for the browser to forward install requests to an eclipse instance some sort of file extension needs to be established to indicate eclipse installer resources.  The web browser can then simply forward the open file request to the operating system, which will in turn forward the request to eclipse.  

Firefox uses a similar system (.xpi files) for their add-on repository, and it works wonderfully.  Their web portal spoils the user with convenience, and I think eclipse should, and can, too.


Reproducible: Always