Hi all,
I'd like to raise to general
awareness a technical proposal for Platform and others, that I believe
is worth progressively going mainstream as it's a noticeable
simplification to multiple processes, and that is very likely to be
achievable in a short timeframe.
Basically, the idea is to get rid of source features.
Indeed,
source features are not so important artifacts per se, what really
matters is making source bundles available at build-time (to include
them in p2 repositories or products) and at dev-time (to make them
available in the IDE).
All that make that instead of managing source
feature artifact, we have workflows to make source features available to
the user basically with just 1 flag at build time. On Platform, this
would allow to avoid lots of "touch" commits when an external version of
a dependency changes; we can stop listing transitive deps in
feature.xml (p2 resolves them) but still have their source bundles in p2
repo (Tycho adds them).
Of course, things
are rarely perfect on 1st shot; but the more people try to make it
perfect, the more it is likely to become so. To get there, anyone
interested please consider trying those new capabilities and report
issues. In the best case, you may be able to get rid of source features
and some build customization; in the worst case you'll report issue.
Cheers,
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