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Re: [pde-dev] A reminder that our target platform user experience is still lacking

On 01/20/2015 06:46 PM, Curtis Windatt wrote:

http://youtu.be/wwHK4Wkwcvg
https://www.eclipsecon.org/europe2014/session/enhanced-tooling-modern-eclipse-plugin-development

One of the points that Mickael repeatedly made in this presentation was that it was the target definition editor that caused the issues, not the target platform API, not the p2 resolution process.  While his examples used a local p2 repository, he indicated that changing the target platform through the API is significantly faster than using the editor (even though both are running the same target resolution).

Note that although we are massive users of target definitions for JBoss Tools, we've also abandoned using the PDE target definition editor for various small bugs and limitations, that when accumulated, don't make the definition of target definition very pleasant. We've then updated directly the XML files and implemented a set of maven mojos to tweak the target-definition more efficiently (https://github.com/jbosstools/jbosstools-maven-plugins/tree/master/tycho-plugins/target-platform-utils/src/main/java/org/jboss/tools/tycho/targets ).

The first things that come to my mind that are annoying/missing for edition are:
* When updating the IUs for a given site, the selection isn't set to current IUs
* Inability to select bundles or other invisible IUs
* Inability to automatically update versions of IU when we change a repo URL. For this, what I'd expect is that if I'm editing a target definition, and changing an URL for a p2 repo, a wizard automatically pops up asking whether we want to check for updates, makes the check and then suggest to change the definition

I believe that with those 3 issues fixed, I would stay inside the IDE to edit .target files.

HTH,

--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat
My blog - My Tweets

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