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Re: [pde-build-dev] building Eclipse with Maven

Hi,

Just to introduce myself - I'm one of the Maven developers that has been
discussing this recently with Jeff in relation to OSGi. I'm new to OSGi
and Eclipse plugin development but am quite familiar with working in a
component-oriented environment. Please forgive any obvious questions I
might ask as I get up to speed.

Jeff McAffer wrote:

>
> There has been some discussion about building OSGi bundles with Maven.
>   I don't know much about Maven but hear that it has some
> infrastructure that might be interesting.  I am concerned however
> about it appearing to want to be on top.  It would be very interesting
> to understand how one can feed dependencies into Maven and control the
> resolution of those dependencies.  This seems key when dealing with
> systems like OSGi which have a very rich dependency model.

One option mentioned briefly was that pde-build could generate a Maven
POM as an alternative to the Ant build script, and let Maven provide a
lot of the services that are being generated. These are provided by
Maven plugins - which could easily be OSGi bundles in the future since
Maven is built around a component architecture.

As far as it "wanting to be on top": this is really a matter for those
using Maven to build as you need to add additional information such as
that provided in build.properties of pde-build. For dependencies in the
repository using the information OSGi provides is most likely sufficient.

It seems the dependency model is to some extents similar, though Maven
doesn't have any notion of package importing. Fragments were also
mentioned - I'm not sure if they are similar to Maven profiles or not,
but regardless are not going to be as similar as the bundle requirements
which seem to map straight on to Maven dependencies. It is possible that
Maven could use an alternative resolver for its dependencies if
necessary (which is what Jeff mentioned you are doing with pde-build).

>
> So, if there is anyone out there who knows about Maven (actually Maven
> 2 seems a better choice) and wants to take a stab at setting up a M2
> based build for Eclipse, lets hear from you.  It should be quite
> instructive to take a small set of existing bundles (say the 11 RCP
> bundles) and see if we can build those for a couple different
> platforms (e.g., Windows and Linux GTK).

I have a busy month ahead but I plan to take a look at this in some down
time. Can you point me in the right direction with this? I'm not an
Eclipse user (at least not recently) so I'm really starting from scratch
here.

I've taken a look at the pde-build page and looked through some of the
build files. I have some of this checked out from CVS.
What I'd like to know is how to get started using pde-build to build a
sample bundle. I haven't had much luck there so far. Any other resources
that are relevant would be most helpful.

>From there I would look at setting up a Maven build that could produce
similar results to the generated ant build. Which are the 11 RCP bundles
you are referring to?

Thanks,
Brett




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