[platform-ant-dev] org.eclipse.ant.core in the Equinox project

["Rafael Chaves" <Rafael_Chaves@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

First, a little bit of context:

I am one of the Platform/Core developers
working on the Equinox project. We are porting/migrating existing 3.0 M2
plug-ins to our prototype that runs on top of OSGi (which is a component
framework), and so far we have had good results in the process. But one
of the main differences between regular Eclipse and Eclipse on top of OSGi
is that the latter is much more conservative about giving a bundle (= plugin)
classloader to other bundles. And this is one of the requirements of the
Ant support in Eclipse - tasks can see plug-ins.

Well, we can still do that with OSGi
because we can make the Ant Core plug-in have access to the exported classes
of all bundles in the platform. The slight diference between this approach
and the current one in regular Eclipse is that not only those plug-ins
that declare extensions to Ant Core extension points will be available
to the AntClassLoader. All Eclipse classes will be available. So, since
currently the AntClassLoader looks first into plugins (except for Ant classes)
and then into the JARs classpath, we may end up getting classes from the
wrong place (from plugins instead of from JARs). This can be avoided if
we do it the other way around: first loook into the JARs, then into the
plugins. What, of course, causes a similar problem: classes declared by
plugins may be hidden by those declared in JARs.

Now, the question is: is there a problem
with any of these changes (*all* plugin classes available to the AntClassLoader,
and classes being looked first in the JARs classpath, then in plugins'
classloaders)?

Thanks,

Rafael