[buckminster-dev] Reusing existing plugins as commands/actions

[Thomas Spiessens <thomas.spiessens@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi guys,
one of our team members has written a new Buckminster command that 
simulates the product export as you do within the Eclipse IDE itself by 
calling PDE code. In this way, we don't rely on PDE anymore as we used 
to (we used to export the product as described in "Eclipse Rich Client 
Platform: Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java™ Applications" by 
McAffer and Lemieux). Hence, our build script becomes a lot simpler.

For us, this was a first attempt to create a Buckminster command. We 
would like to have an action as well to do the same thing. Our goal is 
to keep the number/complexity of Ant scripts (or any other scripts) to 
an absolute minimum and to use Buckminster to take over the things these 
scripts do.

What is your idea on reusing existing Eclipse plugins from within 
Buckminster and providing commands/actions for them ? For example: 
product export, javadoc export, ... All of them are available from 
within Eclipse and I think it should be possible to reuse them.

In one of the previous posts on this dev mailing list, Thomas wrote "We 
intend to provide extension points so that actions can be tied to a menu 
item of choice in the IDE, but the design of that is not finished yet." 
Could you elaborate on this because this seems to be something we are 
very much interested in as well ?

Kind regards,
Thomas Spiessens.