Re: [epp-dev] Important structural change in Eclipse Neon

[Markus Knauer <mknauer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

See below for my answers...

On 23 February 2016 at 03:32, David M Williams <david_williams@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> no, an upgrade from the old structure to the new structure is unfortunately not supported

The EPP packages will still have a product definition and feature, right? I'd think that would suffice to update across yearly releases. (...)

Yes, there is still a product definition and a feature, and without such a major structural change I'd say that an upgrade makes sense in the future.

Right now all package products include their own package feature, the common EPP feature with additional dependencies, and the Eclipse Platform feature directly, i.e. those three are not root features and cannot be uninstalled. To me this sounds like the best approach because without any of those features, especially the Eclipse Platform feature, Eclipse won't start. And updating the Eclipse Platform without updating the underlying EPP product isn't anything we'd like to propose to anyone. A bug that is so severe that it deserves an update of the Eclipse Platform should result in a rebuild of the packages.

All other dependencies are 'root' features now, except a few cases where something was optional and defined in a p2.inf file.

On 23 February 2016 at 10:43, Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 02/22/2016 08:27 PM, Markus Knauer wrote:

Hi Marc-Andre,

no, an upgrade from the old structure to the new structure is unfortunately not supported. Maybe someone comes up with a good idea/solution but I have my doubts.

Despite not being supported, I witnessed migration from Luna to Mars.1 for the regular EPP Java package on Linux working well, simply by adding the Mars site to available sites and trying "Check for updates". (...)

Yes, this is also one of my own regular test cases, and it works amazingly well in most cases.

BUT it won't work as expected when updating from the old (Mars) structure to the new structure (Neon). If you look at the attached screenshot you will see the result of the CPP Mars.1 package *after* an upgrade to the new Neon structure. If you look close enough you will find out that the product (epp.package.cpp) is there with its direct children, the three features mentioned above. But if you compare this to a new pristine Neon build with the new structure, you will find out that *all* other root features have disappeared and are not there any more.

One of those missing features after a Mars.1 to Neon upgrade would be org.eclipse.cdt... that's not something that we should propose to our users. Well, unless a reader of this mail has a good idea how to circumvent this.

(In case this sounds negative... that's *not* my intention at all. I changed the package structure of the RCP/RAP package as a prototype in Mars to gain some experience, and I didn't get any negative feedback so far!)

Thanks for reading up to this point!

Regards,

Markus