Don't speak until spoken too

As the 3.2 release date approaches, I thought that it would be a good time to install Callisto. We're performing an RC2 2-day test pass on the Platform so I didn't really plan on digging too deeply into the features of Callisto right away but I thought it may add a bit of variety to the test pass to have some new stuff to look at. It turns out that even just having Callisto installed while doing my Platform testing was a useful exercise and here is why.

I had several plugin projects in my workspace and needed to close a few. Upon doing so, I got an exception from a validator that was trying to write out some project preferences. There were two problems with this. Firstly, the validator should not have been writing the preferences out during the project close delta (hence the exception). However, the larger problem is that I was doing plugin developement and the validator that was writing out the preferences had nothing to do with developing plugins.

There's been a lot of talk about Eclipse and Callisto as a Platform. An important aspect of this is how invisible a component is if it is present in an install but is not being used. We've really felt this with the Eclipse CVS client since it is part of the SDK but is not of interest to all users of Eclipse. One can think of Callisto as a mega-SDK so the same rules apply. However, we developers become so focused on improving the feature set of our components, that it is hard to adequately test how well our component behaves when it is not being used.

So, if you would like to help out testing for Callisto but you only use a small subset of the features, it is still worthwhile to install the whole thing. Then you can help tests the parts you care about and also help to ensure that the parts you aren't using remain silent.