In reply to EclipseZone – Favor the old or the new?:
What do you think? Should new functionality and user interface changes be always on by default, always off, or does it depend on the change?
In this specific case, the change was done to enhance the user experience. Thus, I strongly disagree with a default OFF behavior.
In general, I prefere having all new features enabled by default but providing an option to disable them if that might be desirable. I guess that such an option would not be worthwhile for all new features.
Innovation should not stop from being published just because someone needs to update some screenshots or documents. New features are always documented by the Eclipse committers. Thus, you’ll be informed about them in every new milestone release they appear. IMHO this gives enough time to discover and to discuss the impacts on downstream clients.
Unfortunately, in this case the developers couldn’t manage to get a switch for the old behavior in before the 3.1 freeze. In the 3.0 “new look” case the community discovered the issue earlier. Thus, we had enough time to “re-“develop the 2.1 look.
I´d say it depends. Some features, that probably cost a lot of performance (compared to the win), should be off by default (I´m thinking about the exit points of a method e.g.).
On the other hand, if new features are not published to the default settings, there is the danger that they don´t get tested well by the community.
If a feature is a big improvement, it should be in the default setting. I, for my part, don´t like the default settings much: You have to turn on the line numbers and switch from JRE to JDK (for better Javadoc) at the very least (I guess the later is by design. no big deal – the former is really annoying.
Another problem is that default settings are for each workspace. So if the default settings don´t evolve, the amount of time you spend on tweaking each workspace (alright, their is import – export) increases.