Re: [pde-dev] Target UI Discussion

[Chris Aniszczyk <zx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 8:13 AM, Don Laidlaw <Don.Laidlaw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The following comes from my two years of work writing OSGi based server-side
> software, and doing all of that in Eclipse PDE.
>
> I must say I really like using the p2 repositories as a backing for targets,
> but I agree there are times when I just want a folder or list of folder full
> of bundles to simplify things.

This is bad because folders aren't necessarily shareable. The goal is
to make target definitions a shareable asset that can be shared by
developers and used by build. We will still work to try to enable this
workflow but note that by pointing to some folder on disk it may
reduce the chance that the target is shareable.

> When developing code you type: SomeClass sc = new SomeClass
> And hit CTRL-Space to generate an import. This should have another helper in
> the list to search the target platform for potential matches, then update
> the manifest with an import, and do the java import. To be efficient, this
> may require some kind of indexing operation on the target platform, and this
> feature could be disabled until that index is built.

I'm working on some aspects of this problem. I'm first solving this
"where's waldo" problem on enabling quickfixes on missing imports and
missing require bundle statements. You would be able to solve project
related problems via easy quickfixes that would search repositories
and install bundles into your target.

The other part of this problem is enabling people to use a
"Ctrl+Shift+T" type workflow for searching for
bundles/packages/features. If you're looking for something and it's in
the list of your target repositories, it will be added to your target.

> A really cool feature would be to integrate p2 with maven so that:
>
> You write a maven pom to depend on all the bundles you wish from a maven
> repository.
> You use that pom to create a p2 repository where all the p2 metadata lives,
> but the bundles themselves are still in the maven repository.
> You can use this in a target definition.

This whole p2/maven thing can be solved if someone took the time to
write a metadata/artifact p2 repo implementation.

If someone pointed me to some Maven API docs (basically something that
reads POMs) I can get something started.

p2 would transparently handle the metadata whether it comes from
Maven, old update site format or something like OBR.

Cheers,

-- 
Chris Aniszczyk | EclipseSource Austin | +1 860 839 2465
http://twitter.com/eclipsesource | http://twitter.com/caniszczyk