[forge-dev] How should plugins keep up with api updates

Koen Aers koen.aers at gmail.com
Thu May 31 03:54:17 EDT 2012


Hi Thomas,

First of all, if you want to use JBT, always install it in the Eclipse Java EE bundle. For SVN, use the 'Add Software' wizard and select the Subversion plugin from the Indigo update site (you'll find it in the category 'Collaboration'). If you do plugin development it might also be handy to install the Eclipse SDKs.

In any case your arguments and comments kind of support my earlier point. It is way more handy to install a pre made bundle of Eclipse plugins (such as the Java EE bundle and/or JBT) than to have to deal with all the individual Eclipse plugins. Even though you seem to have problems with the Eclipse way of managing plugins, I believe their system is not that bad if you stick to the 'blessed' bundles. So transposing this to Forge, it would be good to have our very own bundle(s) of 'blessed plugins' that can be installed as a batch in any runtime. This implies that there should be integration tests that test the installation and working of these bundles with their compatible runtime(s) as well as a mechanism to isolate different versions of the Forge plugin bundles if there is more than one version installed. There is already a 'pluginDir' option available that indicates that Forge needs to load plugins from and install them in the specified folder. This mechanism was created as a (partial) solution for the above problem but maybe it needs to become the default?

Cheers,
Koen

But first of all, if you want to use JBT, always install it in the Java
Op 31-mei-2012, om 08:22 heeft Thomas Frühbeck het volgende geschreven:

> Lincoln,
> are you one of those lucky guys who don't have to hassle regularly with incompatible plugins in Eclipse? 
> Just a hint: 
>     - I tried to install JBoss Tools 32bit into classic Eclipse 32bit on Win7 - it failed in the middle of installing ???
>     - SVN: there are two prominent plugins, incompatible, one looking half way like the other but handling is very different in the hard cases, PITA from start to end, I see myself reverting regularly to the command line 
>     - for some time recently I couldn't update my m2e plugin because it carried a dependency to a something in version 1.1 which was not released yet ???
> 
> Have a look at the different flavors Eclipse IDE bundles - to me the main reason for those is: plug-in (inter-) dependencies and plug-in management.
> I don't want to complain, but to me these are the everyday problems I face _after_ I told my boss that the fix xxx will only take an hour :-/ (The fix itself may take 5 minutes, the rest of the day it will take to get the infrastructure of the project up and running again.)
> 
> And then we are programmers open for the newest, latest, greatest. And of course any author of a plugin would want his customers to pick up the new functionality ASAP. 
> So I think one core features is a stable, manageable plugin life cycle.
> 
> Thomas
> 
> Am 31.05.2012 07:40, schrieb Lincoln Baxter, III:
>> 
>> On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 6:18 PM, Burr Sutter <bsutter at redhat.com> wrote:
>> Well said Thomas - I am a great "dumb user" and plug-in dependencies drive me nuts.
>> 
>> What do you mean by plug-in dependencies? What drives you nuts?
>>  
>> 
> 
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