> The broken concept is that "test" means "non-main
That is not true, test means it is only compiled with other test-scoped
sources.
Look more closely at how things are implemented in practice, particulary the example I gave above and
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=539998 confirm that this "test" flag is capable of breaking downstream adopters in the workspace.
There is no such thing as "test-bundle" thats a pure PDE/Platform term,
Exactly, there are bundles and that's all, and this "test" flag is really a bad way of controlling the visibility while that's already controlled by OSGi.
Maybe later we can have more and more bundles with actual "test" (not shipped) source in them to do it the Maven way, and then using the "test" flag will be correct. But at the moment, the way it's used in the context of plugin development is wrong as it relies on a misunderstanding of what this flag is supposed to achieve; it's more than a simple decoration.
actually you depend on something that is not supposed to be deployed as
a bundle elsewhere and should be simple (test scoped) library dependency.
Wrong. Eclipse Platform do provide in some test bundles some utilities that are fine to reuse by other projects to help them writing their tests. That's what I'm doing here.
So it seems, it actually is useful (also for platform) but we better put
workarounds into effect instead of fixing the tooling issue...
I don't get how it is useful for Platform. Can you please mention any actual issue that was fixed or prevented with addition of the flag, to compensate this issue it is causing?
