[babel-dev] Babel Galileo Update Site

[Kit Lo <kitlo@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I spent some time in the past few days
to understand the p2 publisher problem. I noticed a few things.

Ian agreed in https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=274025#c36
that there is still a problem with the p2 publisher. The p2 publisher does
not scale when there are many many features and plugins like our case with
the Babel language packs.

However, my understanding of the p2
publisher is that it's just a tool for converting a number of different
resources (e.g. update site,  features and bundles, or product) into
a p2 repository. If we have all the time in the world, and the patience,
the p2 publisher will eventually finish (in about 20 hours). I tried connecting
to the newly generated p2 repository and update my Eclipse SDK 3.5 RC4
for Win32. The update failed with the following message:

!MESSAGE Missing requirement: org.eclipse.core.net.linux.x86
Pseudo Translations NLS Support 3.5.0.v20090531043401 (org.eclipse.core.net.linux.x86.nl_en_AA
3.5.0.v20090531043401) requires 'bundle org.eclipse.core.net.linux.x86
0.0.0' but it could not be found

Our update site is including all the
plugins we built using all the translations we have in the database. That
includes plugins like:

org.eclipse.core.net.linux.x86.nl_<locale>
org.eclipse.core.net.win32.x86.nl_<locale>
org.eclipse.compare.tests.nl_<locale>
org.eclipse.pde.build.tests.nl_<locale>

The problem is, if we are running Eclipse
on Win32, the org.eclipse.core.net.linux.x86 plugin is not installed.
If we are running Eclipse on Linux, the org.eclipse.core.net.win32.x86
plugin is not installed. Also, the *.tests plugins are only available
from CVS source repository but not included in the Eclipse downloadable
binaries.

Update Manager is just reading the update
site info and p2 repository, looking for the required Fragment-Host bundle,
and it's true that it could not be found.

Therefore, I think the fundamental problem
may be the way we build our update site. I don't have much experience in
building update site. I wonder if there is an option to tell Update Manager
to install a plugin "only if the Fragment-Host bundle is available".
Otherwise, just skip the updating the plugin.

Kit Lo
IBM Eclipse SDK Globalization Technical Lead
Eclipse Babel Project Co-lead