No Business Naming Things

My iPod froze up in the middle of Of Montreal earlier this evening.  After a forced reboot it came up with the frowny “contact Apple” icon.  Weeping (inside) I tried rebooting a few more times and plugging it in to the computer.  No dice.  Sad that it died, I put it aside and didn’t think of it again… until I saw it on the main menu about fifteen minutes later.  Hmmm.  Here’s keeping my fingers crossed - I can’t afford to replace it right now.

People have been asking for the ability to filter the user interface in Eclipse based on some abstract notion of “roles” for many years now.  We partially addressed this issue via the introduction of activities but this solution is problematic at best - activities were designed to be gradually revealed over time and they were never really intended for hard lockdown of the user interface.  Any effort in this direction could be easily circumvented by a manual call to the Workbench activity manager, for instance.  Nonetheless, people have been using it for this purpose simply because there has been no alternative.

There is a lot of discussion happening on bug 201052 (”[RCP] RCP should provide some role based access control to UI elements”) at the moment pertaining to this issue.  There are numerous solutions sketched out as proofs of concept and any input into this would be greatly appreciated.  This problem wasn’t on our radar at all for 3.4 and without community support it probably wont see the light of day.  If this is a problem you’re interested in please take a look at the bug.