[news.eclipse.technology.equinox] Re: On dependency management

["Olivier Gruber" <ogruber@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Erich,

Sounds like good stuff, but I always regret the lack of integration of PDE.
It would be great if the buildpath at the JDT would understand those things
too. I find cumbersome to construct a build path for Java in terms of
projects
and jar files, when I am building dependencies between plug-ins. This is
even
more confusing if you throw fragments, which show up in the buildpath but
not
in the plugin dependencies.

Actually, I will go even further saying that the dependencies should
understand
features. Indeed, I like Jeff's analogy between features and Java profiles.
So when I am developing a plug-in, I would know the features that will be
available
in the target Eclispe, but most likely not the details of their plug-ins...
which by the way
depends on the target OS, WM, and ARCH.

Hence, I believe we should have a notion of a profile or a configuration,
which
ever we want to call it. This profile would mimick the intended deployment
target.
That configuration should server to construct both the plug-in dependencies
and
the buildpath. Not only the buildpath, but also drive which features are
installed
when PDE is launching the target environment.

This is where features, fragments, and plug-ins are not well integrated in
the overall
Eclipse, from development to deployment. Development is too much
project-based
while deployment is solely feature-based. Supporting features as first-class
concept
seems to me the way to simplify all this.

Best regards,
Olivier.

"Erich Gamma" <erich_gamma@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:3E590C7D.4090105@xxxxxxxxxx
> >Meaning, show which classes require which other classes from the
>  >upstream plugin.
> This is already supported in PDE since a while.
> In the depency view or the manifest editor's
> Dependency tab you can select a required plugin and
> execute "Compute Dependency Extent". This will show
> you the types required from the pre-req by this plugin.
>
> There is also a "Find Unused Dependencies" action. It will
> report which pre-reqs are potentially not needed. This
> helps you to clean-up and minimize your pre-reqs.
>
> --erich
>
>