[equinox-dev] Getting equinox artifacts using maven

[Christian Schneider <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am currently helping Scott Lewis to bring ECF to Apache Karaf.

Our biggest problem with this is that ECF needs a bunch of equinox 
bundles that are not available in maven central.
See this 
http://download.eclipse.org/rt/ecf/3.10.0/site.p2/karaf4-min-features.xml

At the moment we use http urls to be able to get at least started. These 
urls are not really good for people inside bigger companies though.
Often these companies do not allow direct access to the internet even 
for developers and especially for production machines. So accessing the 
urls is not possible.
Additionally they are not cached like mvn urls. So every clean startup 
of karaf hits the p2 repo server again.

It also makes it very hard for people to use these artifacts in non 
tycho builds which are very common outside the eclipse world.

I have noticed that eclipse already hosts several maven repositories for 
other projects. Would it be possible to also deploy equinox bundles into 
such a repository or even better into maven central?

At apache this is very convenient. We have a nexus server at apache and 
the project poms are set up to deploy their for snapshots and releases 
there. Releases go to a staging repo automatically and after the vote 
you just need to press a publish button and the artifacts go to maven 
central.

I am pretty sure we can organize to help with this if eclipse would be 
interested to also get such a setup.

The collaboration between eclipse projects and apache projects is still 
quite slim unfortunately. I think one big reason for this is the 
separate repository systems that make it very difficult to use projects 
from each other. So I think tackling this problem would help a lot to 
improve collaboration.

I have read in another thread that this would be a "complicated" 
problem. Unfortunately there is no further information what the 
obstacles are. I spoke to quite some people at eclipse about this and 
they are all quite interested in maven deployments. So I think at the 
minimum there should be an open discussion so people understand where we 
are with this. Is there some place maybe on bugzilla where I can read 
into what was discussed about this?

Christian



--
Christian Schneider
http://www.liquid-reality.de

Open Source Architect
http://www.talend.com