Small Projects : provide a better help system

[opcoach]

The Eclipse IDE, in all of its provided packages is shipped with all the help plugins. This is cool because we can get the help automatically inside eclipse, but it costs a lot in term of download size.

Actually do we access often to the inline Eclipse help ? A public web version could be enough for the majority of users ?

Let's run this command in a standard Eclipse Modeling install (2024-09), considering that help and doc plugins are concerned :

du -ch help doc
756K org.eclipse.epp.mpc.help.ui_1.11.0.v20240709-0639.jar
312K org.eclipse.help.base.source_4.4.500.v20240903-0240.jar
444K org.eclipse.help.base_4.4.500.v20240903-0240.jar
184K org.eclipse.help.source_3.10.400.v20240415-0528.jar
228K org.eclipse.help.ui.source_4.7.100.v20240621-0541.jar
544K org.eclipse.help.ui_4.7.100.v20240621-0541.jar
208K org.eclipse.help.webapp.source_3.11.500.v20240606-0803.jar
752K org.eclipse.help.webapp_3.11.500.v20240606-0803.jar
280K org.eclipse.help_3.10.400.v20240415-0528.jar
1,2M org.eclipse.mylyn.help.ui_4.4.0.v20240617-1534.jar
1,3M org.eclipse.mylyn.wikitext.help.ui_4.4.0.v20240820-2036.jar
5,1M org.eclipse.egit.doc_7.0.0.202409031743-r.jar
15M org.eclipse.emf.cdo.doc_4.2.12.v20240904-1115.jar
12M org.eclipse.emf.compare.doc_3.3.24.202401051648.jar
3,1M org.eclipse.emf.doc_2.31.0.v20230828-0744.jar
2,0M org.eclipse.emf.ecoretools.doc_3.5.1.202404261351.jar
12K org.eclipse.emf.parsley.doc.source_1.18.0.v20240826-1656.jar
860K org.eclipse.emf.parsley.doc_1.18.0.v20240826-1656.jar
20K org.eclipse.emf.transaction.doc_1.5.0.202408231629.jar
20K org.eclipse.emf.validation.doc_1.5.0.202408231629.jar
20K org.eclipse.emf.workspace.doc_1.4.0.202408231629.jar
1,3M org.eclipse.gef.cloudio.doc_5.0.2.202311221639.jar
5,9M org.eclipse.gef.common.doc_5.0.3.202311221639.jar
1,0M org.eclipse.gef.dot.doc_5.1.4.202311221639.jar
708K org.eclipse.gef.fx.doc_5.0.5.202311221639.jar
3,6M org.eclipse.gef.geometry.doc_5.0.3.202311221639.jar
1,1M org.eclipse.gef.graph.doc_5.1.0.202311221639.jar
3,1M org.eclipse.gef.layout.doc_5.0.0.202311221639.jar
11M org.eclipse.gef.mvc.doc_5.2.5.202311221639.jar
4,9M org.eclipse.gef.zest.doc_5.1.4.202311221639.jar
7,7M org.eclipse.jdt.doc.isv_3.14.2500.v20240827-0447.jar
7,2M org.eclipse.jdt.doc.user_3.15.2300.v20240823-1014.jar
240K org.eclipse.mylyn.github.doc_6.5.0.v20240617-1534.jar
16K org.eclipse.mylyn.wikitext.asciidoc.ui_4.4.0.v20240617-1534.jar
112K org.eclipse.mylyn.wikitext.asciidoc_4.4.0.v20240630-0904.jar
4,3M org.eclipse.ocl.doc_3.22.0.v20240902-1518.jar
320K org.eclipse.oomph.p2.doc_1.14.0.v20230625-0755.jar
2,5M org.eclipse.oomph.setup.doc_1.14.0.v20230618-0610.jar
6,0M org.eclipse.pde.doc.user_3.16.0.v20240821-1908.jar
41M org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv_4.33.0.v20240827-0447.jar
4,0M org.eclipse.platform.doc.user_4.33.0.v20240823-1014.jar
16K org.eclipse.uml2.doc_5.5.0.v20221116-1811.jar
1,7M org.eclipse.xsd.doc_2.28.0.v20230614-0743.jar
152M total

So in this release, help and doc plugins occupies 152 Mb on 696 Mb (around 20 %) !! That's a lot... Imagine that the millions of downloads save 150 Mb each time, we could really reduce the impact of downloads.

I have not made stats on other packages delivery, but it will be basically similar.

On the other hand, the local help displayed in the browser is delivered by an internal server, running on the laptop and available on this URL : http://127.0.0.1:61015/help/index.jsp?token=833b21f2-a510-4e55-a845-619de90e7ad9

Actually the millions of users will access to a local web site that could be hosted only once on the eclipse web site...

And having all the help files locally is only needed by the org.eclipse.help.ui plugin (to provide inline help in the IDE). In this case, if the help is needed, a dialog could appear to propose to download it.

The goal of this discussion is to define a small project that could be driven by students and to define the main tasks that could be done and the objectives to achieve.

For instance :

• identifying the amount of place wasted by the help in all the different packages
• finding differences between 'doc' and 'help' plugins
• creating an option to download the help plugins only if help is used using the help window instead of in browser
• changing the products definitions to remove the pure help plugins and add the new downloadable help
• generating the static help web site, for each version, to make it accessible on eclipseide.org

...

This small project, can contain all the tasks expected in a 'student project', such as : analysis, finding solutions, coding and testing and of course having discussion with the community to make it working.

This discussion is opened to prepare it in a more formal format.

[opcoach]

In addition to the existing static documentation we should consider to provide an internal RAG chatbot in Eclipse to help to deal with the help.

[danthe1st]

I want to note that many people have a big (and IMO justified) hate towards LLM chatbots (including RAG applications) included in many applications nowadays.
As an Open Source IDE, I think Eclipse should try to not annoy users with features like that and if these are built, they shouldn't be installed by default and there should not be any annoying buttons/banners/etc. for it.

[opcoach]

The idea is to provide another way to access the documentation.. asking a question in natural language instead of browsing tons of documentation ... My suggestion is not necessary to force these "many people" to use it because it would be provided by default.. a first step is to provide this kind of tooling on the market place and see how it is adopted...

[danthe1st]

I don't have anything against this approach as long as it isn't promoted (much) in the IDE outside the marketplace.