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If you’re an Eclipse user, you probably heard of p2. There seems to be two groups of people: Those who adore it and those who hate it. I’m in the latter group. Here are my reasons:

1. Where do I get the installer? There is no explanation on the Getting Started page. Try this link.
2. The 3.4M7 release doesn’t even start on Windows because it’s broken.
3. The installer fails if the directory to install to doesn’t exist, yet. Hey, it will be fixed after the 3.4 release!
4. When I tried a shared install, it crashed. That’s supposed to be fixed but I didn’t dare to try again.
5. Not enough? Well, if any of the downloads times out, you have to delete the install directory and download everything again (Bug 231826).

So I’ve downloaded four (4) versions of P2, tried them and all of them failed before I could even start Eclipse.

Banana-ware: Harvested before ripe, delivered green and ripes on the customer’s computer.

Another one for the futile/harmful optimization awards: The New & Noteworthy page for Eclipse 3.4M4 says:

The new ‘Convert to StringBuffer’ quick assist (Ctrl+1) transforms string concatenations into more efficient, albeit less compact, code using an explicit StringBuffer:

Hello? Since when is using StringBuffer more efficient than using String concatenation? Answer: It was upto Java 1.3 (or maybe 1.2; I’m too lazy to look it up right now).

With Java 1.4, the compiler used StringBuffer as well, so this optimization doesn’t buy anything but makes the code harder to read.

Worse, with Java 1.5, the compiler generates more optimal code by using StringBuilder instead of StringBuffer. The builder is not synchronized; since string concatenation doesn’t suffer from threading issues, this is safe and faster!

And the morale: If you optimize something, make sure you don’t rely on some myth about X being faster than Y.

PS: Of course, there is already a bug tracking this.