[cross-project-issues-dev] Capabilities in Galileo

[Thomas Hallgren <thomas@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,
The current way of managing capabilities in Galileo is somewhat external 
to an otherwise very clean and straight forward process. In order to add 
capabilities today, the contributor must:

1. Create a capability bundle.
2. Add this bundle to the org.eclipse.galileo feature
3. Add an entry in a map in the org.eclipse.galileo.build/maps/galileo.map

The build contribution is not used at all and two new artifacts that are 
foreign to the project are introduced that a contributor must be aware 
of and maintain. The approach also requires that the builder now must 
check things out from various places in CVS and SVN and build them from 
source. That in turn, increases the complexity, the size of the builder, 
and makes the build much slower.

I have a proposal that will make the build contribution the sole 
interface between the contributor and Galileo, and retain the builder as 
a mean and lean P2 verifier/assembler. Each project would instead do this:

1. Create a capability feature that includes the projects capability 
bundle (or bundles). The name of the feature must end with ".capabilities".
2. Add this feature in the build contribution, just like any other 
feature but without any categories.

That's it. No map file entries and no need to add anything to the 
org.eclipse.galileo feature.
Behind the scenes, the Galileo builder will collect everything included 
in the ".capabilities" features and include that in a generated 
"org.eclipse.galileo" feature.

Does this seem reasonable?

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren