Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] Obscure org.eclipse.platform dependencies

[Thomas Hallgren <thomas@xxxxxxx>]

On 2010-11-18 21:54, Miles Parker wrote:
> But many of us do have extra target platform dependencies -- it should 
> certainly be possible to duplicate a target platform to each project 
> and then provision just the additional pieces, right? -- that's what 
> we do for local provisioning after all and it works great. Do the 
> Buckminster folks have any thoughts about this?

My personal opinion is that target platforms are less then ideal for 
sharing between builds. I think that p2 repositories is a much better 
vehicle for that. After all, provisioning a TP from a repository is a 
quick and painless unless you have a slow network sitting in between. So 
to me a TP is a very intermediate and somewhat opaque part of the build.

Indigo is a huge aggregate of builds produced in +0 to +n (currently n = 
3) steps. It would be possible to draw the whole thing as an directed 
acyclic graph starting with the sources used for the +0 and ending with 
the complete Indigo. Let's assume that each build consumes p2 
repositories for everything except their own source and produces p2 
nothing but p2 repositories. Between each +x and +x+1 there would be a 
composite repository witch children from the previous step and the 
product of the current step. +3 would then see a composite consisting of 
the produced repositories from +0, +1, and +2. The +3 composite would 
more or less be the Indigo repository although in a somewhat 
non-validated state.

Once nice thing about this approach is that it doesn't impose any 
special build technology on the projects involved. All build-systems 
used in Indigo today can consume and produce p2 repositories.

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren