| [cross-project-issues-dev] Suggestion: Consider providing "latest" p2 repositories |
Hi,I wanted to make a suggestion to the folks maintaining update sites on download.eclipse.org. Of course almost all projects provide various composite p2 repositories for different "build qualities" such as releases, milestones, integration, stable, and nightly builds. Even when well managed though, these repositories can grow to include a significantly large number of child repositories. We often use such composite repository URLs in our builds, target platforms, and Oomph's targlets, but in most cases, we're really only interested in the latest version of each installable unit for some specific build quality. I.e., in most cases we'd be better off if each of such composite had a corresponding "latest" composite that pointed to a single simple repository containing the latest release, milestone, integration, stable, or nightly build. Not only would this make builds and target platforms resolution faster, download.eclipse.org would be better utilized by serving only content and artifact metadata for the composite and for the single simple repo, rather serving n + 1 of these where n can tend toward umpteen, e.g., as in https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=532213 where the composite contains 211 repos. As an existing example, http://download.eclipse.org/releases/latest points to the latest release, although it currently points to a composite that in turn contain 3 releases (which is kind of fishy because there are more releases of Oxygen than are included in the composite).
Please consider providing such a convenience to your consumers and please consider using them if/when available; the download.eclipse.org server will thank you by providing better performance. If you're depending on EMF, EMF is already provides a "latest" for each of its composites: http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/emf/emf/builds/index.html
Regards, Ed