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In our product (call it OurProd), we have many features that are not installed off of the install CD. Some of these features are optional, and some, due to licensing issues with other companies, are not allowed to be on the install CD at all. Our problem comes in the case where is installed as an extension into another product(s), say Prod1 and/or Prod2. Under the current mechanism, any features that are laid down with the native installer will get update properly, but any features that are brought down with the Install/Update manager will end up with the features of the product that was running at the time. These features are a part of OurProd, not the product that is currently running. The user found out about them because our 'base' OurProd features installed the discovery URL's. We need a mechanism to allow a feature to say where it belongs. In the case of OurProd, we know that we will have our base features installed. I would like any other 'optional' features we have to be able to say that they want to be installed with the 'base' feature/plugin. If this is left as it is now, we can end up in the scenario where OurProd is extended into 2 or more products. If the user updates any existing OurProd features, these update will be available across all the products we were extended into. On the other hand, any new OurProd features that are downloaded, will be put in with the product we are running, even though they are OurProd features. Now we have the case where the product is 'polluted' with our OurProd feature. As well the other product(s) we are extended into will not see these features. This is now inconsistent with the experience of updating an existing feature in an extension.
Proposed solution: Allow a feature to state an "affinity" for another feature. This would be done with an new, optional "colocation-affinity" attribute on the <feature> element; the value would be the id of the feature that this feature would prefer to be co-located with. E.g., <feature id="com.example.wsdd.extrafeature" colocation-affinity="com.example.wsdd.baseFeature" ...> would indicate that this feature (com.example.wsdd.extrafeature) would prefer to be located in the same local site (eclipse extension install or eclipse product install directory) as the feature named "com.example.wsdd.baseFeature". The affinity is viewed as a suggestion, or hint - not as a constraint: - the user should be able to override this suggestion (ordinarily they would not) - it is no crime to actually install the feature in opposition to its stated affinity - if the feature is already installed somewhere, updates will gravitate to that site regardless of any stated affinity to other features - if the other ("com.example.wsdd.baseFeature") feature is already installed at one local site, then the suggestion chooses that sites over others - if the other feature is already installed in more than one local site (same version in different sites, or different versions), then the suggestion is narrows the choice to these sites but not further - if the other feature was not already installed (and was not being installed), then the suggestion is moot The changes required to implement this feature affect both the update core and the update UI. A user could hand edit the feature.xml in the short term; long term, the feature editor should provide support for displaying and setting the affinity attribute.
The proposed tag will meet our requirements
Fixed and verified in HEAD. Will verify in F2
Built JAR file, replaced JAR from 20020531, works fine Will still check with F2 I have 2 features. I installed Feature 1 in another Site than platform:base Restart Attempt to install Feature2. The newly created site appears selected Cancel Attempt to install another feature. Platform:base is selected <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <feature id="org.eclipse.update.core.feature1" label="Product Feature" provider-name="Smart Company" version="1.0.0"> </feature> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <feature id="org.eclipse.update.core.feature2" label="Extension to Product Feature" provider-name="An even Smarter company" version="1.0.0" colocation-affinity="org.eclipse.update.core.feature1"> </feature>
Verified in F2
verified in F2
