| Re: [pde-dev] Target Platform question |
Hi Jeff,I understand the need to support conventions that has been around for a very long time. I'm not at all suggesting that this should stop. My reaction is more to why this has to dictate the behavior for a brand new target platform provisioning in a way that prevents us from exploiting p2 beyond what the old UM could do. I don't think it needs to be that way.
The problem as I see it is twofold. One is the phrasing "Include required content", the other is the assumption derived from the strict version ranges. I understand that the latter was added as a best guess to accomplish the former.
To me, the checkbox is about planning strategy. I.e. should the p2 planner be used, or a permissive slicer. The choice for me has always been the latter because that's the only way that allows me to provision a platform independent target. I couldn't care less about if the original requirement stems from a feature, a bundle, or something else. So to me it's a real bummer that this choice also implies that only strict dependencies are traversed.
I would like a choice that results in use of the permissive slicer with the considerOnlyStrictDependency = false and I think that will work very well for most people. Sure, the resulting target platform might contain some bundles that are not strictly needed for a build, but then again, it's very likely that you do need them in order to run self-hosted. I think such a choice would be a much better compromise then the current one until a more elaborate solution has been put in place. It makes no assumptions about conventions used when publishing. It just works. Both for running self-hosted and for publishing platform independent sites.
Going forward, I think we should make use of the greedy attribute. I can't really see the reason why we don't use that for feature requirements.
All projects built using Buckminster can use this approach. I know for sure that Buckminster itself does. As does b3. I think some modeling projects still do. For projects outside of Eclipse, I don't know.For context, do you know of many projects other than the EMF folks who are using this approach of mapping inclusions to version ranges?
I know that all epp projects switch from using includes to using requires because they wanted the products to be updatable using p2. I've encountered that argument many times over the past year. You don't want your feature to freeze what's there and in case of common components, you want to avoid conflicts.
- thomas