[p2-dev] Trying to make sense of agent, installer and director

[Torsten Schlabach <tschlabach@xxxxxxx>]

Hi all!

I am currently trying to gain an understanding of how I will manage my
Eclipse SDK and Eclipse based product installations in the future. This
includes both RCP apps as well as possibly headless installations. I
understand p2 is what I want in the future, for a number of good reasons.

Now I am trying to understand what's offered to me at

http://download.eclipse.org/equinox/

I think I am most interested in the sections

Provisioning
Launchers

What would be the difference between

- A launcher for my platform
- An Equinox p2 agent
- An Equinox p2 installer
- The Equinox director which is not listed here at all, but I found it
on the Buckminster update site

My guess was:

- The agent can install arbitrary artifacts into arbitrary locations.
This is managed using some kind of profiles.
- The installer is a special purpose agent which can only install
Eclipse SDK?
- The director is the same as the agent, just it can run headless.
- After I will have installed by SDK for example, using either the agent
or the installer or the director, I will not yet have a launcher because
Launchers are not installable by using p2.

Are my guesses about right?

Regards,
Torsten