[jbosside-dev] Bundling features/plugins in the build system

[Marshall Culpepper]

Hey guys..

Over the past few days I've been playing with the build system trying to
understand exactly how and what Eclipse bundles with a feature when it's
being built.. I think I have a pretty clear understanding of what's going on
now. I have implemented an ant task that can automate some of the places
where pde build drops off, but I wanted to start a discussion about how
things should work WRT our new distribution idea..

Things PDE build does/doesn't do:
1) If a plugin is listed as a <plugin> in your feature.xml, it will get
bundled in the final ZIP file automatically (we were including 3rd party
plugins to let eclipse do a lot of the bundling for us)
2) If a plugin is listed as an <import> in your feature.xml, no bundling
will occur
3) If another feature is listed as an <include> in your feature.xml, no
bundling will occur of that feature or it's plugins

Things the old ant task did:
1) Took a list of plugins and added them to an arbitrary zip file.

The old ant task was pretty annoying as you all probably know it required a
list of plugins in a property file, which had to be synchronized every time
one of our dependencies changed or one of our plugins changed it's needs. I
have replaced the old task with a java-based task that recursively pulls
requirements from your feature's feature.xml and corresponding plugin
manifests.

Things the new ant task current does:
1) Takes a name of a feature, and sets a property to a list of plugins that
are not in the standard SDK that that feature depends on. This list is
pulled from the <import> and <include> tags.

With the new ant task we will be able now to automate bundling by just
keeping our feature.xml's up to date. I am also thinking about making the
new ant task make the "dependencies" it generates be not just plugins, but
features also. That way our bundle contains not just plugins but features
(which it probably should have all along). So, in short.. with the new ant
task.. this will be the "new" behavior provided from our build system:

1) If a plugin is listed as a <plugin>, it gets auto-bundled just like in
standard PDE build (no change). Anything here will be seen in both "bundle"
and "nodeps" downloads.
2) If a plugin is listed as an <import>, that plugin and all of it's
recursive dependencies will be auto-bundled (only for "bundle" downloads)
3) If a feature is listed as an <include>, that feature and all of it's
plugins (and recursive dependencies) will be auto-bundled (again only in
"bundle" downloads)

Basically, I just want you guys to chime in if this is or isn't the expected
behavior you think we should have for bundling...

-- 
Marshall Culpepper
marshall.culpepper at jboss.com
JBoss Eclipse IDE Lead
JBoss, a division of Red Hat
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