[jbosstools-dev] XULRunner / ATF Update site

[Marshall Culpepper]

Hey everyone..

Recently I was looking over ATF's update site format to get a clue for 
how dependency on Mozilla's XPCOM and XULRunner plugins was handled. I 
found that the main ATF feature itself does depend on org.mozilla.xpcom, 
but not any of the XULRunner features/plugins. I also ran into another 
interesting problem. XULRunner has been bundled as a seperate feature 
for each platform implementation, and the plugins themselves live at a 
different URL than the features that I found.

The 3 platform-dependent XULRunner plugins live at the following URL:
- 
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/xulrunner/releases/1.8.1.3/contrib/eclipse/

And the 3 platform-dependent XULRunner features live at the following URL:
- http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/xulrunner/eclipse/features/
But the plugins listed at the corresponding "plugins" dir are outdated!
- http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/xulrunner/eclipse/plugins/

I have a few questions since this was rather confusing..

1) Why are the URLs for feature JARs and plugins so radically different? 
Shouldn't the features / plugins dirs be in sync with each other?
2) Why is XULRunner packaged as 3 seperate features? This becomes hell 
for dependency management purposes. It was easier for me to just write 
one simple feature and put platform/OS conditions on each XULRunner 
plugin. You can find my feature.xml here:
- 
http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/trunk/vpe/features/org.jboss.tools.xulrunner.feature/feature.xml
3) Why isn't ATF depending on XULRunner feature/plugins like it is with 
XPCOM? With the feature linked above we were able to have our feature 
depend on it, and use external plugin/feature jar linking (ala the 
current ATF update site) to have Eclipse auto-check XULRunner when the 
user presses "Select Required"

Just hoping to get some clarity on how ATF depends on XULRunner and 
how/if we can reuse that knowledge for our project =).
Thanks!

-- 
Marshall Culpepper
Red Hat Developer Studio, JBoss Tools
marshall at jboss.org