[epp-dev] current status and EPP download packages

[Markus Knauer <mknauer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi *,

first of all the good news: Download packages are available for Windows and 
Linux on the download page http://www.eclipse.org/epp/download.php.

But now a list of problems:

* The native installer for Windows is not included. Reasons for that can be 
found in my last email. Please solve the build and IP issues!

* Visual Editor will be included in one of the next test packages. The 
versions that are currently available don't work with Eclipse 3.3.

* It was the wrong decision to build the packages in the week after M7 of the 
Eclipse Platform. EPP is using the PDE Packager and relies on working update 
sites, but these update sites were changing all the time. It took more time 
than anyone of us expected. From the outside it may look a bit weird, because 
in general its about using 'just' PDE build and update manger, and this 
should be easy ;-) [But debugging the ANT tasks and the update manager isn't 
really fun.]

* Mylar has dependencies to PDE. That's the reason why we need PDE in the Java 
and J2EE packages. Is it possible for Mylar to remove these dependencies? It 
would allow us smaller download packages, but it would also lead to a better 
end user experience ('Why do I get those PDE features, when I'm downloading 
an Eclipse Java package???')

* Having an XML editor in a package means integrating large parts of webtools. 
In my opinion this is caused by the structure of the update sites. We (EPP) 
can only include features that are reachable directly from the update site 
(i.e. the feature must be in the site.xml). Webtools has only org.eclipse.wst 
available in the site.xml - the features org.eclipse.wst.xml... that we need 
are hidden for us.

Can someone else take over the Visual Editor, Mylar dependency and XML editor 
problems while I am on holiday (until 2007-05-27). Apart from the Installer 
issues, these things should be solved somehow.

Well, I am sure that I've forgotten something important, but I will send it to 
the list when I'm back. In the meantime please file bugs in bugzilla, write 
your comments and thoughts either to the mailinglist or to the newsgroup.

Regards
Markus