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[equinox-dev] [prov] wondering how pluggable the IU user model is


Maybe I'm really wondering how much the IU taxonomy will change from product to product.

We've already discussed that the presentation to the user of what a repository is may differ from product to product.  Or at least that most end users (of the Eclipse SDK, RCP products) are unaware of metadata and artifact repositories as separate entities.  I would expect that many products would want to keep the concept of a "site" (maybe plug in their own terminology or icons), so we must have API to find the artifact repo from a metadata repo or colocate them.   (See discussion in https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=200259).

Same is true for profiles.  A user of most RCP products, and even many Eclipse SDK users, would likely not want to know that the provisioning infrastructure supports multiple profiles.  Their view is likely of the "product install location" or something like that, and the fact that there exists a profile that drove this configuration, the fact that bundles might be shared, etc...would be hidden.  

So now I'm wondering if the same is true for IU's, at least those that the user knows about.  We have the notion of IU's that are groups (which is how we filter the IU views in M1).  And Pascal is thinking about an "entry point" concept that would define what the "product view" of a bunch of installable units would be.  

Should we assume a particular taxonomy for most/all RCP apps and build a UI that can be reused in this way?  
Pascal, do you think the entry point concept is the way that we would expect many/most products to show the user what they have?

I used to think that I could build a fairly reusable update UI that could be plugged into different products.   Products could define their terminology for things like IU's (feature, add-on, plug-in), and repositories (sites, repositories, etc.).  Then I realized that we need to do some mapping from the user view (site) to the reality (metadata + artifact repo), and that we might have a default strategy (such as colocation of repos), but ultimately we can't assume how repos are presented to the user.  

Do we think that, for IU's, we can also come up with a default strategy (such as entry points) for deciding how to present IU's?  ie, how to filter the list of IU's the user sees, and more interesting, what would show up on the property page for those kinds of IU's.  

I hope this makes sense....

susan

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