In the Eclipse 3.3 plan, there’s an item about product customization. It seems work has been well under way by our dear pirate lovin’ Kim Horne. I personally have some mixed feelings about product customization (but Kim is behind it so good things will come!), maybe I’m an idealist, but Eclipse’s motto has always been to add and not take away (or transform in this case). Product customization may have merit in some cases, but I think it takes away from the spirit of building on top of something great and refining it in the process to make it more consumable by everyone. Is XSLT kludge the right solution here?
However, I do have a case where product customization could possibly be useful… in PDE we have a bug open to refactor the templates in PDE into a separate plug-in. In theory, you could use product customization to modify PDE’s plugin.xml to remove all templates so only your product’s templates would be included. But is this right? Isn’t the solution for PDE to have a separate plug-in for templates so products could easily drop the bundle if they don’t want the extra templates? I’m worried about cases like this where people go for the kludge instead of pushing for the proper refinement.
Other than that, I think Kim is exploring an interesting area 🙂