[News.eclipse.technology.packaging] Re: Welcome to eclipse.technology.pa

[Thomas Hallgren <thomas@xxxxxxx>]

Hi John,

John Cooney wrote:
> I was glad to see this project proposal, but have a few questions that 
> don't appear to be in scope based on the proposal.  Are there guidelines 
> or standards on how workspaces can be packaged/shared?  My usecase is 
> that I have a set of features/plugins to roll out to some new users.  
> I'd like to get them started as soon as possible with a configuration 
> that is tuned to a new user.  Examples of some things included; other 
> s/w distributions like the JDK and Tomcat, a sample project so people 
> can kick the tires on the plugins, and some customizations like having 
> some snippets prepoulated.  Is there something better than workspaces to 
> manage this? 

Indeed there is. What you need is a tool that is able to materialize workspaces based on 
component specifications. This is the exact problem that Buckminster 
(www.eclipse.org/buckminster) aims to solve. Buckminster can extract a Component 
Specification with all dependencies that a certain component (feature or plugin in your 
case) from the component meta-data. With this definition in conjunction with a Resource Map 
that maps component to locations, Buckminster can do transitive resolutions and create a 
BillOfMaterials (BOM). The BOM in turn is used in order to materialize a workspace. The BOM 
will appoint components that resides in source code control repositories (we currently 
support SVN, CVS, and Perforce), at Eclipse Update sites, in repositories such as Maven (or 
Maven2), ftp servers, etc.

All definitions are in XML and can be shared between different members of a team. Please 
take a look at Buckminster and don't hesitate to ask more questions on our newsgroup 
eclipse.technology.buckminster

Kind Regards,

Thomas Hallgren
The Buckminster Project