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Home » Eclipse Projects » Equinox » p2 - dropins deprecated? What are the plans for the future.(Is the dropins directory for installation of plugins officially deprecated?)

p2 - dropins deprecated? What are the plans for the future. [message #1747461]

Tue, 15 November 2016 02:52

Eclipse User

We provision our Eclipse installations by dropping
plugins into the dropins folder of the Eclipse installation.
I read at https://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox/p2/FAQ that dropins seem to have been
deprecated ("... dropins are not recommended, and has been
officially deprecated by the p2 team").

If support for dropins would be removed we would have to redesign our
provisioning processes for all Eclipse based products.
Currently the processes are simple and easy to manage. Removing the dropins support would have a painfull impact for us.

So my questions are:
1. Are there concrete plans to remove the dropins support in terms of a time schedule?
2. Where can we find an official deprecation information?

Re: p2 - dropins deprecated? What are the plans for the future. [message #1748043 is a reply to message #1747461]

Thu, 17 November 2016 22:36

Eclipse User

Hi Nils,

Installing a complete product through the dropins has never been a good idea because anything installed by this mechanism is treated as a best effort, and thus can be uninstalled by something installed by the regular p2 mechanisms.
For example. today everything is good, tomorrow one of your user install something through p2 (UI, marketplace, cli) and some parts of your product no longer work.

Even IBM for which the dropins has been made overly fancy has now stopped using it Smile

Now to answer your questions:
> 1. Are there concrete plans to remove the dropins support in terms of a time schedule?
Not really, unless of course it started to limit us for some other work, or it is causing too much maintenance.

>2. Where can we find an official deprecation information?
I could not find the official trace, but I know for sure that this has been indicated, and in the worst case, take my words for it Smile

Pascal

Re: p2 - dropins deprecated? What are the plans for the future. [message #1748048 is a reply to message #1748043]

Fri, 18 November 2016 02:37

Eclipse User

Hi Pascal,

to describe the background of our scenario:
1. We create Eclipse workspaces with all needed settings fully automatically including individually configured Tomcat and (for RSA) WebSphere Servers and for RDz also create Host connections etc. This process was invented over 10 years ago and works fine. Now and we use it in our Eclipse, RSA and RDz installations. In our implementation we still need the plugin version of the automization plugin not to be changed when we update the installation. You might consider this as a technical dept but it will cost us some time to redesign it. This is truly not impossible but has to be planned.
2. Our installation process in independant from Eclipse and we use dropins instead of update sites because this is the most simple way. This causes less time and causes less failures than using update sites, which we currently even dont build - we deliver our software to more than 500 developers. The versioning of our tooling is centrally stored in the software delivery tool. Therefore we can find out who has what installed without using p2 directly and without having access to the client computers.

Can i subscribe anywhere to get informed in case that the removal of dropins support will be scheduled?

thanks,
Nils

Re: p2 - dropins deprecated? What are the plans for the future. [message #1779759 is a reply to message #1748048]

Fri, 12 January 2018 04:57

Eclipse User

If the .\dropins folder is deprecated, well i can do nothing about it.

But the idea of having all plugins and features, all mixed does not appeal to me.

I like the "factory-version" of Eclipse (or the official shipped/ downloaded version) and add all required plugins (that I use) in the \dropins folder.
This enables me to share the factory version with a team mate and not the polluted version - as he/ she may not require the plugins that I use.

Also it may save internet bandwidth.
Some companies have some odd restrictions - only staff above designation X, can download others cannot (for them they have to raise a ticket and put in a justification).

What alternative do I have now?

thanks
Jeevan

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