Re: [equinox-dev] Incubator commit rights for Kim Horne

[BJ Hargrave <hargrave@xxxxxxxxxx>]

+1 for Kim

But I find the use of XSLT to be stomach turning. XSLT programming is not 
easy. I support Peter's thoughts on having a programmatic way of 
transforming metadata. Then the programmer can use whatever programming 
language is desired/appropriate to effect the transformation.  Some of the 
examples on the wiki page could be done more obviously with a simple sed 
script (or regex).

Also, does the transformation need to be done at runtime? It seems the use 
cases are all packaging issues in assembling an RCP based product. Why not 
just have support for transformation at packaging time instead of runtime. 
This will then remove the runtime variability which can cause 
stability/debugging issues.

BJ Hargrave
Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM
OSGi Fellow and CTO of the OSGi Alliance
hargrave@xxxxxxxxxx

office: +1 407 849 9117
mobile: +1 386 848 3788




Jeff McAffer <Jeff_McAffer@xxxxxxxxxx> 
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10/23/2006 10:47 PM
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Kim Horne <Kim_Horne@xxxxxxxxxx>
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[equinox-dev] Incubator commit rights for Kim Horne







The 3.3 plan 
        
http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/development/eclipse_project_plan_3_3.html 
has an item related to customization 
        https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=154099 
Kim Horne (UI team) has been investigating some techniques for 
transforming plugin.xml files and thus the registry contributions they 
contain. Basically this amounts to a mechanism for spec'ing an XSLT style 
sheet and then running the plugin.xmls through the transformer as they are 
loaded. See 
        http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Product_Customization 
 Kim has offered to contribute this to Equinox.  Pretty cool.  But wait, 
it gets better. 

When you stand back from those details, it appears that there are several 
other things that could be "customized".  Manifest.mf for one.  Code for 
another.  The Equinox incubator already includes a work area related to 
Aspects.  The proposal here is that the scope of that work be broadened to 
include transformation of other artifacts.  In addition to the specific 
transformation mechansms discussed, Kim would like to investigate a 
customization brokering service that would match transformers to 
transformations and transformees.  This notion would, for example, allow 
for a manifest customization mechanism to be plugged in.  Ideally we would 
also be able to phrase code customization using this mechanism.  This may 
involve AspectJ weaving or some other mechanism (e.g., for mapping class 
references when packages are renamed). 

In any event, all of these things are in the Equinox domain and Kim is 
offering to drive at least part of this effort.  To facilitate that, I 
propose adding Kim as a committer on the Equinox Incubator component. 
Please respond to this list with your votes. 

Jeff _______________________________________________
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