[platform-update-dev] Update manager BoF notes and bundle repository

["Alex Blewitt" <alex.blewitt@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

I posted my recollections on the Update Manager BoF at
http://alblue.blogspot.com/2006/03/eclipse-eclipsecon-birt-and-update.html
for your interest. If I've forgotten anything, let me know (or post it
as a comment to the blog) so there's a record. Or failing that, I
could mail the contents out to this list :-)

I think the talk raised a lot of issues, and not all of them seem to
have solutions right now. However, I think a lot of good thinking went
forward and there were some good things.

I'd like to move the discussions relating to the update manager
forward. There's also the aspect of internally push-managing the state
of individual machines and allowed plugins which I think is a related
but distinct issue. It would probably be good if people who were
specifically interested in that to propose a set of threads on this
mailing list to drive that forwards.

I think the key part of any repository is going to be the separation
of the bundle from the metadata about that bundle, and that bundle's
dependencies. Trivially, we could just extract the Manifest.MF out the
bundle itself and use that as the set of information used; or it could
be converted into a different format (such as Maven's POM.xml) or even
wrapped in another container format (such as Atom.xml) -- or even a
combination of these.

(For those that haven't read it before, I have suggested the idea of
migrating features towards bundles, in
http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t63174.html and
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=126732. The idea is that
there's no semantic difference between a feature (which is a top-level
collection of a number of bundles) and a plugin (which is something
that depends on a number of bundles) -- provided, of course, that you
use Requires-Bundle instead of Import-Package. However, the top-level
bundle/feature could still use Requires-Bundle to express its
dependencies, even if the bundles that it depended on were all
implemented as Import-Package.)

Anyway, there's a separate issue about the discovery of repositories
which also needs to be addressed, but perhaps can be done after a
structure for a single repository is created.

Alex.