Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] [cbi-dev] Building SimRel with Tycho for

[Frederic Gurr <frederic.gurr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Thanks Mickael for pushing this and sorry for the late reply!

I've started to look at your changes and have a few questions:

* is there a good reason why the pom.xml has been moved to a module
instead of keeping it in the root pom.xml/directory?

* can you give some insight what "remove-xz" and "add-aliens" do or why
they are necessary?

* how did you create the category.xml file? (side note: I opened the
category.xml file with the category.xml-editor and the opening alone
re-wrote/re-formated the whole file.)

* According to the comment, the list of repositories in the pom.xml file
was generated with the CBI aggregator tool. Was that only necessary for
the initial list? What would a new project need to add and where? Only
add bundle/feature to the category.xml and add the repository to the
pom.xml?

* is there still a way to only validate changes like the "validate" profile?

If we want to switch to Tycho for the 2020-03 release, we will need to
put some documentation in place for existing and new users what needs to
be changed and done.

Regards,

Fred

On 10.11.20 16:43, Mickael Istria wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> With a recent patch, Tycho has achieved a major milestone that allows it
> to be a viable replacement to build SimRel repo in place of the very
> specific CBI aggregator. Specifically, Tycho now can validate a build
> plan without downloading all artifacts, so it can allow the Gerrit
> patch/CI feedback short feedback loop.
> 
> The principle and benefits of this change consists in getting rid of CBI
> aggregator specific files, models, builders... which no-one beyond a few
> privileged (?) ones know how to deal with. By moving it to more
> mainstream and better known Maven+Tycho+category.xml stack, we allow
> more people to participate in the maintenance of the SimRel aggregation;
> and we also get rid of one brick to maintain (CBI aggregator) in favor
> of a well maintained and active one (Tycho). This will overall result in
> some resources saving and SimRel entry-barrier being much lowered.
> Of course, there are some features of CBI aggregator that don't have
> equivalent in Tycho, and the other way round; sending emails for example
> wouldn't be available anymore. But times have changed since the
> introduction of CBI aggregator (called b3 back then): CI rose, Code
> Review rose, all this DevOps things basically matured and has brought
> solutions for the use-case that were directly supported by b3. Not so
> objectively, I don't know of any feature of CBI aggregator for SimRel
> build that we would really miss when moving to Tycho. I don't the
> replacement this will either increase difficulty of contributing to
> SimRel or to maintain it.
> 
> This Gerrit patch shows it in action
> https://git.eclipse.org/r/c/simrel/org.eclipse.simrel.build/+/170553 .
> You see it adds 1 category.xml file with the content of SimRel, and the
> list of p2 repositories in the pom.xml.
> 
> I think all that stack is mature enough, and the value/savings in
> changing to Tycho is compelling enough to consider this migration for
> 2021-03.
> 
> Cheers,
> -- 
> Mickael Istria
> Eclipse IDE <https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/eclipse-packages/>
> developer, for Red Hat Developers <https://developers.redhat.com/>
> 
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-- 
Frederic Gurr
Release Engineer | Eclipse Foundation Europe GmbH

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