[buckminster-dev] Buckminster - a lot of questions

[ted stockwell <emorning@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

I am *very* interested in Buckminster.  I have installed the plugins, read the documents, and even materialized the dogfood 
assembly, and now I am looking for some next steps.

I want to dive in and try to materialize a build of our product using Buckminster but immediately some quesions come to mind....

1)... I have no clue how Buckminster found the dogfood component specification.  I just typed 'org.eclipse.buckminster' into the 
  Buckminster Open Project wizard and Buckminster did its thing.  How did Buckminster know where to look for the 
'org.eclipse.buckminster' component specification XML?

2)... We use SVN.  We tag plugin versions in the usual SVN way...by copying the associated plugin project folder under the SVN 
trunk folder to a folder under the SVN tags folder.  To create a particular build of a product we must assemble a workspace by 
hand by checking particular versions of plugin projects out of SVN from the correct tag folder (all based on the feature 
definition for the client).

Does (or will) Buckminster have a standard SVN retrieval mechanism that will work with SVN out of the box?

If so then is there a particular convention that will need to be followed to work with SVN (like a particular folder naming 
convention)?


-----------------------
some background if you care to read this far...

I am the lead tech for a company that produces a business system that is build on top of Eclipse.
Our product is entirely plugin-based.  We customize our product by creating custom plugins for each of our clients and we also 
encapsulate new features and functions into thier own plugins.  We also produce many updates to our core product.

We desparately need something like Buckminster to manage/materialize builds for all our clients.
Our build process is currently PDE driven, that is, driven entirely by features.  We create a unique feature definition for each 
of our clients.  So, for any client we basically know the exact collection of plugins, and what versions of those plugins, go 
into a particular client's build.
However, its a real pain-in-the-butt to build a particular version of a product for a particular client - and the process is 
also very error prone.  Also, tagging plugins with version tags is a big hassle (we use SVN).

-----------------------

TIA,

Ted Stockwell
rpcsoftware.com