[ecf-dev] ECF remote services support for Eclipse 3.5.x

[Scott Lewis <slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Folks,

ECF 3.2...due to be released this week (Feb 19) has some dependencies on 
new code/additions to the ECF core bundle (i.e. org.eclipse.ecf).  These 
additions were/are needed to support the OSGi 4.2 remote services 
specification, which I implemented in December.

Problem is, the ECF core bundle is distributed with the Eclipse platform 
rather than the ECF SDK.  The reason for this is that Equinox p2 uses 
ECF filetransfer (which depends upon and requires ECF core), and so ECF 
core and ECF filetransfer bundles are included in p2 and Eclipse.  The 
version of ECF core bundle in Eclipse 3.5.1 is fairly old (Sept 2009) 
and so needs to be updated for the remote services work to function.

One consequence for this is that once we release the ECF 3.2 SDK (Feb 
19), it will be necessary for people to get/use an Eclipse milestone 
(e.g. 3.6M6) in order to fully use the ECF 3.2 remote services 
features.  Because of the additions to ECF core described above, they 
will be unable to install ECF 3.2 sdk into Eclipse 3.5.1 and seemlessly 
use the new remote services work.  This is obviously undesirable, 
because it means that it will make it more difficult for people to use 
ECF 3.2 remote services (they will need to get Eclipse 3.6M5+...or get 
the ECF core bundles separately to add them to their target platform).

The question is...what to do?  There are a couple of possibilities:

1) Require people to use Eclipse 3.6 milestones to fully use the new ECF 
remote services
2) Create a new distribution for Eclipse 3.5.1 that includes the new ECF 
core bundle.
3) Create a patch for Eclipse 3.5.1
4) Provide some more documentation for people to work-around
5) Do something else that I haven't thought of

The rub here is that I personally do not have any time to work on the 
ECF build this week...and there will probably be work necessary to do 2, 
3, 4, or 5.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Contributions?

Thanks,

Scott