[news.eclipse.technology.equinox] Re: Self Hosting Thread

["Pascal Rapicault" <pascal_rapicault@xxxxxxxx>]

ARGH ! I've been fooled by my newsreader that directly answered to Olivier.

I'm trying to keep up with Olivier fast pace ;-) and just comment
a few things I've seen here.
First, just as a regular user of the self-hosting I don't have that many
problems, and don't see all the problems you named as being so painfull...
But I'll go through what I mean here. Note that I'm not from the PDE team.

> There is a one-to-one mapping from Java projects to plug-ins or fragments.
    This is untrue since plug-ins can contains only doc, and fragments often
    contains translation files..

>Dependencies between plug-ins translates into dependencies between projects
at build time.
    Yes, but it's like any regular java code...  Moreover, although plugins
require
    plugins, the dependencies between project is now handled in a nicer way
when
    the libraries of plugins are imported as variables referencing the jars.

> It so happens that the buildpath is actually driving the runtime path.
    Indeed it's backward. The build path is computed to match at best the
runtime path.
    I know it, I fixed it recently...

> Indeed, the runtime path is constructed through features.
> A user or administrator installs features, not individual
> plug-ins or fragments. Therefore, a typical target environment
> for a plug-in may only be known in terms of features... not in terms
> of the details of which plug-ins and which fragments.
    Personnaly I consider the features as being a shipping facility, and not
a
    runtime one. You can have dependencies among features, but I think it's
    wrong to have the plugins knowing about their features: a same plugin
could
    be packaged in different features.
    Moreover as a plugin writer you don't want to restrict your plugin to
run on
    a given feature, whereas all the plugins you may needs are here.
    Let's for example consider the case, where in 2.2 we decide to have a
different
    organisation of features (like several UI features, different levels of
core, etc...)
    Do you think it's normal plugins got broken?


> However, the update manager does not allow to install back-level features
(Eclipse 2.1).
> [...]
    I don't really see the benefit of that relatively to the self-hosting
pb.
    If you need to fix a plugin, you need to import the code, and you can
also
    choose the location you import your plugin from (or run against) in
various
    places in the workspace.

So to be short, I'm just not convinced yet that having features at runtime
is of any help.

Regards

            PaScaL