The RT PMC have been discussing how best to handle the donation of Virgo tooling. The conclusion is to donate it into the Virgo subproject of RT because much of it is Virgo-specific.
However, after donation it would be desirable to factor out the generic, standards-based capabilities of the Virgo tooling into the OSGi Enterprise Tools project.
The OSGi Enterprise Tools leads have already been consulted about this direction, but it was suggested I post here for the record and for the benefit of the community.
> The RT PMC have been
> http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/rt-pmc/msg02089.html how best to
> handle the donation of Virgo tooling. The conclusion is to donate it
> into the Virgo subproject of RT because much of it is Virgo-specific.
>
> However, after donation it would be desirable to factor out the
> generic, standards-based capabilities of the Virgo tooling into the
> OSGi Enterprise Tools project.
>
> The OSGi Enterprise Tools leads have already been consulted about this
> direction, but it was suggested I post here for the record and for the
> benefit of the community.
You can install just the dm Server tools, which include the Virgo tools, from an update site into vanilla Eclipse Java EE. See bug 327864 for details of the update site.
We considered donating the whole of the Virgo tooling to the OSGi Enterprise Tools project, but a number of the features (PARs, plans, bundle repository access) are Virgo-specific and the OSGi Enterprise Tools is destined to be a sub-project of WTP whose charter restricts it to standards-based tooling only.
So the best solution seemed to be to factor out the standard parts of Virgo and, longer term, standardise the features of Virgo that are more broadly useful. Some of this standardisation is already underway in the OSGi Alliance.