Community
Participate
Working Groups
Created attachment 113687 [details] Screen shot mock-up. PDE's support for adding plug-ins to the current target platform is very helpful, but today it assumes that the target platform is stored within the workspace's metadata, for example: c:\workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.pde.core\target_plugins While you can certainly choose an alternative location, it would be an improvement if the tooling provided assistance with choosing a workspace location. This would support the practice of storing your target platform inside your Eclipse workspace (primarily so that you can store it in your SCM and share it with your team). Things to do: 1. Support choosing a workspace location. The OSGi Framework launch configuration dialog's "Settings" tab has a similar requirement where there are the following 3 buttons: [Workspace...] [File System] [Variables...]. See the attached screen shot mock-up. 2. When a workspace location is chosen the location should be refreshed after installing the update.
I haven't spent any time in 3.5 improving the target provisioner as we have been discussing ways of improving the overall target platform story. But I'm glad to hear that the provisioner is being useful, so I might have to fix this one asap :)
I was trying to configure my workspace hosted target platform and was looking for a way to add some plug-ins that were on an update site, which happened to be on my local machine, but that is not important. I started by looking at the IDE's update mechanism hoping to find a way to specify the destination, but this is just not possible. In Eclipse 3.3 I could at least point the update configurator at a folder and then steal the plug-ins from there for my target platform project. Jeff McAffer pointed me at the "Add..." button, which until now I had overlooked. While I'm a keen Target Platform user, I'd never had the need to "Add..." anything. This could be a case of the UI presentation needing some immprovement, but I understand how hard this can be. Maybe the Target Platform editor needs a way to link to this "Add..." behavior. Today the editor provides a way to add "Additional Locations", but they must exist in the correct format on disk rather than on an update site.
Fixed in HEAD. I only added the workspace button because most variables wouldn't be very helpful in this case. Also, unlike in the configs, I am not storing the value as a variable. If you select a workspace location I get the absolute path. The value is only being saved in dialog settings, not on CVS, or even among workspaces. For 3.5 we will be looking at redoing the target platform story, taking advantage of p2 wherever possible (e.g. using p2 to manage target platform profiles). I'm not sure whether this will result in the target editor being no longer needed, or whether it will have to be beefed up.
