Understanding how and what people use in Eclipse has always been a challenge. To help address this issue, we are planning to introduce the Eclipse Usage Data Collector (UDC) in the upcoming Ganymede release. The intention of the UDC is to track how people use Eclipse, so as Chris has already pointed out, making it easier to know which features are being used and which aren’t.
The plan is to include the UDC in the packages created by the Eclipse Packaging Product (EPP). The UDC code is therefore being contributed and maintained as part of EPP. If you would like to test out the UDC, there is a version included in the Ganymede M4 packages. We would really appreciate your feedback now, so we can make it better for the final release. Please use bugzilla for any problems or feedback.
As with any tracking feature, concerns about privacy are always top of mind. To address these concerns we are doing two things: 1) all information collected by the UDC and sent to the Foundation server is sent anonymously, 2) individuals will have to opt-in before any information is sent. A version of the terms of use can be found here.
It will be great to hear people’s feedback about this feature and any ideas on how we can improve it.
