[wtp-releng] Have you been P2'd?

[David M Williams <david_williams@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> I also tried this with a later
Eclipse driver .... I20080318-0800 ... but still none of WTP loads. 

As Gary noted, our latest builds "don't
work at all". Here's why. 

The platform has some new dandy-fancy
"provisioning" stuff in their current builds which 
1) breaks the normal way we do things
and 
2) still has bugs. 

See http://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox_p2_Getting_Started

and recent notes on eclipse-dev 
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/eclipse-dev/msg08003.html
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/eclipse-dev/msg08004.html


So, here's a couple of options to try:


Approach 1. All or nothing

A. unzip wtp and all the pre-reqs into
the 'dropins' folder instead of the 'eclipse' folder. You might also want
to get the "sdo-runtime" from the emf page, since the system
is now much more sensitive to any little missing thing (whether you need
it or not). You'll end-up with a directory structure similar to 
...
eclipse
dropins
--eclipse
----features
----plugins
features
plugins

B. startup eclipse _once_ with the -initialize
option. It'll seem to be doing something for a while, then stop. No gui,
no logs, it's just updating meta data in a number of places. (Eventually
it's supposed to do this automatically ... without the initialize ... but,
didn't seem to be yet). 

C. keep your fingers crossed and restart
like usual, without the -initialize option. 

If that works, great. There may be a
few issues. 
1) it's sensitive to "duplicates"
(same id, different version numbers)
2) you can only do it once, as far as
I can tell. If you forgot a pre-req or something, you'll have to start
all over again (to reset various meta data in several places). 
3) It'll be hard to update, say with
one or two fixed features/plugins. 
Workarounds for these and other things
have been mentioned on eclipse-dev
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/eclipse-dev/msg08003.html
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/eclipse-dev/msg08004.html

Approach 2. Incremental

A. download and unzip into separate
folders all the pre-reqs, such as 
emf
gef
dtp
wtp

B. startup your plain'ol eclipse. And
go to "update system", Available Updates, "manage sites",
and one at a time, add the pre-req "local file system" folders.
Here I think you need to drill all the way down so "eclipse"
is the last dir name in added folder, such as .../emf/eclipse, .../gef/eclipse,
etc. 

C. doing them one at a time, you can
see how it goes, what breaks, what you need, etc., a little easier. 

Overall: be prepared for frustration,
starting over, asking questions, and _opening bugs_ against equinox.p2
component. 

We'll also need to change our test scripts,
which I'm hoping I can do from our one central test launcher, but will
let you know if that's not the case. 

We "lucked out" this week
for our builds because the Linux PPC distribution as not yet been P2'd,
so things there work fine. 

Which reminds me ... 

Approach 3. Use Linux PPC 
:) 


BTW, I came up with this options after
about 6 hours of "trial and error" and reading/re-reading various
wiki's and bug reports ... so, don't think it's something anyone could
have known. I was just as surprised as you. I have opened 
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=223238

as "the place to rant" (but
.. be polite .. their just doing their job :)