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Any interest in a distribution mechanism to preconfigure your own eclipse distributions? [message #647331]

Wed, 05 January 2011 11:45

Eclipse User

Hi to all,

we implemented a feature called E.D. (Eclipse Distributor) for our company to have the possibility to handle more developer-groups with different needs of how eclipse is configured. We could imagine to contribute this complete feature as an opensource eclipse-project.
Please answer if you have needs for such a part of software and what we have to do to get part of eclipse.
Following a short descriptions of the already implemented features (many other features are planned):

The distributor is a eclipse-feature which can be used to define preconfigured distributions. For example, if you want to offer a Eclipse with a company-codestyle, a preconfigured findbugs and your cvs-repositories installed, you can use director to automatically build them.

The main features are currently (more features are planned in the future):
- Define different distributions for different recipients and different operationsystems
- Editor to define the parts of distributions
- Define one base-distribution per distribution to download
- Define any number of plugins per distribution to be added (using p2 - director)
- Define any number of additional settings per distribution automatically installed or installed after clicking on a menuentry in mainmenu.
- Define any number of additional preconfigurations per distribution like initial memory-settings in eclipse.ini
- Derive distributions from another distribution. So if you need a base-distribution A and one distribution B with additional plugins or settings you can derive them, what means that you have to define the parts which are contained in any distribution only once
- Automatically create an inhouse-mirror according to the model to avoid dependencies to internet (using b3 aggregator)
- Upload mirror and distributions on a ftp-server you can configure
- Call building of distributions headless. You can use hudson or any other buildserver
- Preconfigure cvs-repositories, codeformatting, encoding, editorpreferences, all available jdks from one basedirectory, checkstyle, savections. proxysettings

I think eclipse has many very good mechanisms to get a preconfigured eclipse like you get with yoxos, but there is not yet and all together-solution for a enduser...
perhaps this could close the gap...

Re: Any interest in a distribution mechanism to preconfigure your own eclipse distributions? [message #648145 is a reply to message #647331]

Tue, 11 January 2011 08:33

Eclipse User

I assume this goes out to bigger corporations that have hundreds of developers.

As i am one of those eclipse configurators that has to do this i am a bit intrested. But as i manage this today what extra will this do?

Today we can manage this via several .product files that includes different features to build what we need. The settings is stored in plugins that configures eclipse the way we want it. Depending on an AD group you can get get the product and the plugins you need.

Hudson with Buckminster / headless aggregator can spit out the product and configurations that is needed.

It has taken time to get to here, so if a tool had been there in the beginning i would have been all for it.

best regards

David

[Updated on: Tue, 11 January 2011 09:07] by Moderator

Re: Any interest in a distribution mechanism to preconfigure your own eclipse distributions? [message #648918 is a reply to message #647331]

Sat, 15 January 2011 09:04

Eclipse User

Hi

We create our inhouse Eclipse distribution using the same tools you
mentioned:
- we use b3 aggregator to mirror all repositories we rely on
- we re-bundle any plug-ins not available from update sites
- based on the SDK package, we install our selection of tools using p2
director using a script spitting out the same distribution for many
platforms
- some projects (especially ones developing RCP clients) have own
distributions which are created using the same mechanism, but a
different list of IUs

Besides that, we developed and open sourced some extensions to the
Eclipse preferences mechanism (ETE [1]) to distribute common
preferences. They add the following functions:
- import preferences not only from local files, but over http/https
- import multiple epf files in one step
- migrate preferences when switching workspaces
- very simple preference change recorder for the admins of the central
preference files

[1] http://ete.kenai.com

Michael

Re: Any interest in a distribution mechanism to preconfigure your own eclipse distributions? [message #651366 is a reply to message #648145]

Sat, 29 January 2011 19:01

Eclipse User

Hi David,

thanks for your answer.
Yes, you are right - in our company there are I guess around 50 developers with different needs... and I work in the team which configures the eclipse distributions with everything that makes life simpler for the programmers.

Our solution gives you the opportunity to create a mirror to decrease the time to load the parts of the installations from internet.
I currently reimplement our ui to get it more userfriendly, so this is my mainfocus... to get configured the installations very fast, very userfriendly to reduce costs

Perhaps you want to take a look at my page and perhaps want to join it? Or just answer what you like and what you dislike at our solution.

http://code.google.com/p/aid/

Best regards
Markus

Re: Any interest in a distribution mechanism to preconfigure your own eclipse distributions? [message #651367 is a reply to message #648918]

Sat, 29 January 2011 19:15

Eclipse User

Hi Michael,

thank you for your answer. I looked at your homepage and there are several good ideas you implemented....
This download and synchronizing of preferences sounds cool.

Perhaps we could join our things together somehow. Or we can get in collaboration anyway... just take a look at http://code.google.com/p/aid/

Currently I reimplement our editor. This was initially a SWT View, but now implementing a multiple page editor with the forms api.
Perhaps I'll add a xtext-editor as second possibility to change model data.
This solution shall get highly extensible (datasources are http,ftp,updatesites, and cvs and svn in future I guess). You can zip it to any kind of archive (zip, tgz...) and I plan to implement a possibility to automatically detect any preference-changes in the current workspace and automatically import it in the model. In the next step even marketplaces shall be searchable or browsable for plugins. And I want to check if any dependencies cannot be resolved or perhapse automatically resolve them....

Best regards
Markus

[Updated on: Sat, 29 January 2011 19:15] by Moderator

Re: Any interest in a distribution mechanism to preconfigure your own eclipse distributions? [message #989137 is a reply to message #651367]

Tue, 04 December 2012 13:14

Eclipse User

Hi Michael / Markus,

I realize this has been closed for a while, but thought I'd take a chance and ask the question: I am trying to do much of what you are doing here, using P2 command line to install basic plugins and get users up and running. Once that is done, I want to allow the users to get updates as and when they want, in this case through the GUI.

When I "Check for Updates", for some reason the updates aren't found, I think because the repo that I am using for Eclipse isn't registered (Help>Install New Software>Available Software Sites" doesn't have the sites registered).

How do you handle this, if you do?

(I am using Indigo/Juno)

Regards,
Steven

Re: Any interest in a distribution mechanism to preconfigure your own eclipse distributions? [message #1012470 is a reply to message #647331]

Thu, 21 February 2013 11:06

Eclipse User

I'm in the process of attempting to create a distribution to build eclipse's, has anyone within this thread ever came to a conclusion, or accomplishment to such?

So far I have only played around with p2's dropins folder, including pointing to an external dropins folder. I have also played around with adding a 'availableSoftwareSite' which points to an external set of xml's with a list of url's I wish to add within AvailableSoftwareSites.

But I need ideas how to turn this into a distribution app where I just build (and thats it).

Re: Any interest in a distribution mechanism to preconfigure your own eclipse distributions? [message #1746059 is a reply to message #1012470]

Thu, 20 October 2016 20:15

Eclipse User

We ended up with a perl-script front-end which detected if "first run=true", user selects from list of plugins which are then installed via the command line ... the one below installs a CVS plugin.

eclipse -configuration -application org.eclipse.equinox.p2.director -noSplash -installIUs org.eclipse.cvs -installIUs org.eclipse.team.cvs.core -installIUs org.eclipse.team.cvs.ui -installIUs org.eclipse.team.cvs.ssh2 -repository http://download.eclipse.org/releases/neon

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