Eclipse modules

[Duncan Gibson]

I noticed today that Eclipse Galileo appears to be available.

If it's anything like Ganymede, there will be separate downloads
for C/C++, plain Java, Java Enterprise, and possibly others, each
of which contain the core and some different plugins.

In the moonbase at the moment we have the following modules,
sorted on the UPDATED date in square brackets:

collab           2.1.9    [20040921] team collaboration plugin
eclipse-profiler 0.5.33   [20041218] code profiler plugin
cdt              3.1.2    [20070324] C/C++ plugin
freemem          1.3.0    [20070617] memory monitor plugin
metrics          3.3.1    [20070617] code metrics plugin
subclipse        1.2.3    [20070701] subversion plugin
ve               1.2      [20070701] visual editor plugin
emf-sdo-xsd      2.3.0    [20070703] modeling/code generation plugin
gef              3.3      [20070703] graphcal edit framework plugin
eclipse-jee      ganymede [20090425] JAVA EE IDE
eclipse-bin      3.5      [20090625] JAVA IDE

eclipse-bin is the original IDE basic module that the plugins
were added too. eclipse-jee is a recent, pre-configured JAVA EE IDE.
Most of the plugins above are obsolete or seriously out of date.

Eclipse now has hundreds of plugins available, and uses its own
internal update system for reviewing and installing plugins. Even
though these plugins are effectively rpm/tarballs that are extracted
into the eclipse directories, it isn't always obvious how to get
past the web interfaces to get at the actual downloads themselves.
And it's these that Lunar modules need to download.

My questions:

Is it worth while trying to maintain these eclipse plugins in their
own individual modules, when there is the eclipse update manager?

Can we reduce the number of eclipse modules to the main IDEs only?
E.g.
eclipse         classic 3.5.0
eclipse-cpp     IDE for C/C++
eclipse-java    IDE for Java
eclipse-jee     IDE for JAVA EE

They would all conflict, but because there would be no plugins
as Lunar modules, there would be no need for an Eclipse alias.

Note that because the plugins would be downloaded via the Eclipse
update manager, they would not be tracked by Lunar. Would this
be a problem?

Cheers
Duncan