[buckminster-dev] Components that come into existence during a build

[Thomas Hallgren <thomas@xxxxxxx>]

Some features may refer to components that themselves are products from a build. Eclipse 
source plugins for instance, cannot be "found and materialized" in a traditional sense 
because they are created on the fly. Question is, how is this best handled in Buckminster? 
Let's assume a top level feature. 'x.y.sdk.feature' that has a reference to the plugin 
'x.y.source'. This plugin is created by copying all source from the plugins x.y.a and x.y.b.

The easy way to handle this is of course to create the x.y.source feature and add a cspec to 
it that performs the rest. But if we do that, we create an artifact that has no other 
meaning then to assist in the build process. I'm now looking at the BIRT project and they 
create all source plugins on the fly. IMHO, we should be able to do that too.

An easy way to accomplish this is perhaps to use a 'prebind' action in the controlling 
feature. The action creates the needed artifacts. The only thing left after that is to bind 
them to the workspace. We could have an ant-task that communicates this to the our internal 
binder.

Thoughs?

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren