Hi Ed et. al.,
I had a "chance" to play around a bit with Buckminister, because I wanted to do some product builds. I thought I had build all figured out until I tried to build an RCP product version, then found that all of the mechanisms for packaging and building are completely different! :( There was no simple path to easily turn a Hudson Athena build into an RCP build that I could discover. Unless one's idea of "easy" involves reading pages of Wiki and then hand-editing XML files for Buckminster. see for example: http://www.ralfebert.de/blog/eclipsercp/rcp_builds/. Their was a bunch of really fiddly steps needed to try to get a local instance of Buckminster up and running, including actually bootstrapping the headless environment from command-line, trying to figure out the inevitable plugin conflicts, etc... I finally gave up and just went with the PDE manual build. And in the end, its still down to a veneer over PDE, so you still really need to (try) to understand all of that.
OK, that sounds a bit bitter and I don't really mean it to be -- its just a too recent memory.. OTOH, I of course do (naturally!) think that model-driven approaches are key to this, and I think Buckminster has a lot of promise, but for my use -- already having an Athena build (finally) running -- thought I really wanted to be able to have a local product build for my own needs -- it felt like adding an additional layer of complexity.
Aside from product creation, now that Athena / PDE can now spit out PFS, that takes care of poor man's development time provisioning. So I guess I'm asking -- non-rhetoriacally -- what the advantage might be for those projects already on Athena?