[platform-update-dev] Install/Update questions

[Tim_Koss@xxxxxxx]

(working in eclipse build: eclipse-SDK-20020528-win32)

We are testing the Update/Install mechanism for use with WSDD 5.0. As I
have mentioned in previous conversations, since WSDD 4.0 (where we
'enhanced the Eclipse 1.0 update mechanism based on Eclipse 2.0 plans), we
have ensured that ALL components of WSDD, whether they were laid down at
install time or not, would be available via the Eclipse Install/Update
Mechanism. Below are items that appear broken in the current drop of
Eclipse.

1) Setting the update location in a feature.xml file.
It seems that in the feature.xml file for a feature, that you can only have
one update entry.
In our case, we would like to have multiple locations for the update. The
simple case of this is where we ship the updates on a cd and we also have
them available on the web. How do we do set this up so both of these
locations are available under the "Sites to visit"? Is this the wrong way
to be thinking of this?

2) Install location
How is the user supposed to know what to do here? At first look, it seems
to us that this should be somehow tied to extensions. Is that true?
Otherwise, the ability to just create a new location and install into
there, seem to be useless, as the feature and plugins will be downloaded,
but the eclipse product will have no idea of the existence of this data as
there is no link file created. When we used the New... button on the
Install locations page, this would let us create a new location where
Eclipse happily downloaded the feature, but this was in no way linked back
to the Eclipse we were running

If it is the case that these locations are somehow related to extensions,
then there is another problem. If you create a product and add an extension
(using the link files), I would have expected to see the extension location
listed in the Install Locations. This was not the case. We only see the
location of the product we have installed.

What we need - In WSDD, all of our portions of our product, whether eclipse
plugins, or class library runtimes, are available via the update mechanism.
Only a portion of these features are installed when the user installs the
product. To get the rest, they can go to the eclipse updates and install
what they want. Due to third party licensing issues, some of these features
will be on the web and on the install cd, and others will only be available
on the web (this relates back to the question 1 above)  We want to ensure
that if a user installs a 'new feature' that they go into the same
directory tree where the WSDD (product or extension) was originally
installed. How can we do this without having the user select this 'Install
Location' (which is VERY error prone).

3) Programmatically finding the feature install location
As Suyog requested in his posting, we need a way to determine where the
feature is being installed. We want the installer handlers to use this to
then navigate the directory tree to decided where to install the runtime
(non-eclipse) data. The location of this data need to remain consistent
based on where WSDD was originally installed. Therefore the location of
where new (but related) features are installed is very important to us - we
don not want the user to determine where to put a feature - for our
features they (unknowingly <g>) already decided this at install time.

Thanks
Tim