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Thu, 13 December 2012 10:01

Eclipse User

This is more of a best practices question.

Currently our organization uses the '.target' files to share target platform definitions with our development teams. We have the '.target' point to internal update sites. This works great except for one thing.

Some of the update sites we point to contains code that is the result of continuous integration. Therefore, the qualifier, and thus the version, are constantly changing.
This makes the '.target' file constantly complain that it can't find a particular feature. It forces us to open the editor, edit the site, select the exact same feature and on we go.

My question is, is there a way around this or is there a better way we should be doing this?

One solution we thought of would be to repo2runnable the update sites as part of a build/setup script that developers would need to run. This seems slow and clunky though.

Anyway, just wondering if anyone else has run into this problem and how they handled sharing target definitions among their developers.

Thu, 13 December 2012 12:58

Eclipse User

Have you tried the update button available when editing a target definition? I don't think this will fully solve your difficulties, but it may be easier to press a button to update a target file over searching for the new feature.

Another option is to set the version of the features in your target definition file to 0.0.0. This is not currently supported by the UI, but p2 should use the highest version available.

Something like the following would help you out, so you could look at contributing a patch: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=182373
Bug 182373 - [target] [p2] Have target update when remote update site changes/updates

I don't think there is a bug for it, but it would be great if the content of the target from a repo could specify a version range.

Thu, 13 December 2012 14:38

Eclipse User

I completely agree. A version range would be perfect. I know there is a p2query language being developed (http://wiki.eclipse.org/Query_Language_for_p2). If the Target definition file could support this, it would be perfect.

Thu, 13 December 2012 14:44

Eclipse User

Also it looks like your version="0.0.0" works. Thanks you sooo much. You have no idea how long I've been looking for a solution to this.

Thu, 13 December 2012 16:18

Eclipse User

I don't think any work is being down on the p2 query language. However, it isn't difficult to programmatically create queries. Not sure how to present it to the user in the target UI, but a query language is unlikely to be user friendly.

I'm glad the 0.0.0 trick worked.

Sat, 15 December 2012 03:27

Eclipse User

On 12/13/2012 06:58 PM, Curtis Windatt wrote:
> Have you tried the update button available when editing a target
> definition? I don't think this will fully solve your difficulties, but

Considering this part, I had already written about the fact that the
update button rarely works (and when it does not it spoils all the
..target file)... do you manage to use the Update successfully?

Tue, 04 March 2014 03:41

Eclipse User

This post is a little bit old, but I would like to share with you the fact that I overcame the target editor limitations with a custom dsl that is used to generate the .target file. You can find it on my github account https://github.com/mbarbero/fr.obeo.releng.targetplatform.

[Updated on: Tue, 04 March 2014 03:41] by Moderator

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