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[p2-dev] RE: Enterprise Use Cases

If this is not the right forum for this mail please let me know, and suggest another.
 
Thanks,
 
Miles
 
Miles Daffin
Morgan Stanley | Technology
20 Cabot Square | Canary Wharf | Floor 06
London, E14 4QW
Phone: +44 20 7677-5119
Fax: +44 20 7056-4572
Miles.Daffin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 


From: p2-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:p2-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Daffin, Miles (IT)
Sent: 17 July 2008 15:41
To: p2-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Meadhurst, Gary (IT); Kralj-Taylor, Mark (IT)
Subject: [p2-dev] Enterprise Use Cases

Dear People,
 
Firstly, thanks a lot to Pascal and team for this week's P2 webinar. The 'p2 metadata from feature/site meta authoring hack' alone made it worthwhile for me :)
 
I intend to make much use of the org.eclipse.equinox.p2.tools.MirrorApplication to provide Eclipse at my company. I noticed at least one other person at the confine mentioned their enterprise use cases, which looked pretty close to ours. So I thought I would open a formal discussion on the subject here.
 
Background: Developers at my firm are prohibited from downloading and installing software from the outside world. This means that we have to provide everything that they need inside our firewall - and keep them contained there.
 
Our main use cases, which I think are pretty generic, are:
  1. Create 1:1 mirrors or external update sites (e.g. Eclipse and Ganymede). (This seems to work.)
  2. Create a *:1 merged mirror based on selected IUs from multiple external update sites which may or may not be P2 enabled.
    • We do not always want all IUs from a site. However, selective mirroring does not seem to work: see BUG 240822.
    • To do this The MirrorApplication needs to be able to merge content and artifact metadata over successive runs. I am not sure if it can currently do this. (Tried merging Ganymede and Eclipse but hit a problem doing a test install of the combined result: 240302.)
    • The merged mirror test I ran, on Ganymede and Eclipse, seemed to produce viable, merged metadata. (I was able to browse this using the P2 install manager.) However, it would be necessary to somehow group IUs from site A into a Site A category so as to avoid namespace collisions and confusions. (Perhaps this could be achieved by sticking a common, user supplied prefix onto all categories from the same site. Just need one extra arg.)
  3. Update both of the previous types of mirror (only mirror new versions of IUs already included in the mirror). At the moment the MirrorApp seems to re-mirror everything each time it is run, which takes a lot of time.
  4. Mirror just the latest versions of any IUs in scope. At the moment you can selectively mirror certain IUs, versions and version ranges (although there seems to be a bug with this: 240822). I would like to be able to pass an argument that would cause the app to mirror just the latest versions of any IUs in scope.
  5. Security Requirements:
    • Test that mirrors contain no malicious code. I guess a simple virus check would suffice. What do people think?
    • Make sure that Enterprise users can only see internal repositories in the P2 install manager's list, and can only install and update IUs from internal repositories. (In 3.3 this was easy: the update policy. I also used to strip discovery information from all installed features so no external update site appeared in the user's list. I cannot see how to do this with P2.)
 
I hope this mail provokes some useful discussion that will help the P2 team focus their efforts in the most appropriate way.
 
Best regards,
 
Miles
 
Miles Daffin
Morgan Stanley | Technology
20 Cabot Square | Canary Wharf | Floor 06
London, E14 4QW
Phone: +44 20 7677-5119
Fax: +44 20 7056-4572
Miles.Daffin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 

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