[orbit-dev] building orbit bundles

[Ben Konrath <bkonrath@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, 

I'm responsible for the Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Eclipse
packages. A requirement for these packages is that everything is
compiled in our environment. Currently we deal with 3rd party jars in
Eclipse by symlinking to the versions installed on the system that have
already been compiled. If there is a version mismatch that can't be
resolved, we update the plugins to work with the version we are
shipping.

Once Eclipse projects start using bundles provided by Orbit, we will no
longer be able to symlink to the jars installed on the system. One
possible solution is to build the Orbit bundle along with our regular
build and create a sub-package that is exclusively used by our eclispe
packages. For example, if we needed to use an orbit provided tomcat
bundle, we would do a regular build of tomcat with the sources provided
by apache and then use a tool to make the tomcat bundle, putting this
bundle in a separate package. Our eclipse build and package would just
require this tomcat eclipse package. Is there a tool to create these
Orbit bundles from regular java jars? If not, are there any plans to
create one? 

I realize that the solution described above may not be ideal because
users may have duplicate copies of the same class files on the system.
I'm definitely open to suggestions. The key requirement for us (and the
other GNU/Linux distributions) is that we need to be able to build
everything, which means we want to avoid cycles in the build
dependency.  

Speaking of which, the icu4j bundles included with the SDK currently
require Eclipse to generate the build files. Is this something that can
be addressed with the efforts of this project? Or should I just file a
bug to resolve this problem. My naive solution would be to import the
contributed icu4j plugin sources into cvs and generate the build files
in the same way that build files are currently generated for the other
plugins in the SDK.

Sorry for the long winded email and thanks in advance for any comments
you have to offer. 

Cheers, Ben