[jbosside-dev] About feature.xml and bundling plugins (WAS: jBPM Designer feature.xml needs to be updated)

[Koen Aers]

> 
> just to be clear:
> 
> Our old/current way of bundling things are *wrong* in context 
> of integrating with the rest of the eclipse ecosystem. you 
> should only have <plugin> for plugins that is actually part 
> of the plugin everything else is <import> of either plugin's 
> or feature's.
> 
> 

Ok while investing some time in the issue of the bundling and the jBPM
feature.xml, I have been figuring out how to use Marshall's ant task and
uncovering which use cases are covered and which are not. While doing
this, I could not understand the very reason anymore of why we are doing
this (may be because I missed the meeting/discussion on this, or else
because I am plain stupid of course). So I read the email thread once
again and have the following thoughts about it.

- The approach with Marshall's ant tasks (bundleDependencies and
calculateFeatureDependencies) only works when building the feature
headlessly. If you want to build the feature by using the
Export->Deployable Features from the Eclipse IDE the approach will not
work.
- Neither the Eclipse IDE build (Export->Deployable Features) nor the
Eclipse PDE build (with the myriad of customTargets.xml,
mainTargets.xml, etc files) support apparently building a feature and
bundling additional plugins where you don't specify the plugins that you
want to have bundled between <plugin> tags in your feature.xml
- Why exactly is it then that our 'old/current' way of bundling things
is so 'wrong'?

The only real valuable reason I see (for now) is Robs comment: 'I'm just
happy manual updating will go away'. But then I lose the ability to
build from the Eclipse IDE... Moreover, I always thought that the
feature.xml *has* to specify all plugins that the feature bundles, there
is nothing 'evil' about that as I understand it. Additionally, doing
this process 'automagically' through an ant task can indeed solve a lot
of manual work, but then the information has become implicit and hence
undocumented. I may be way late with all my ramblings and thoughts, but
I am not so sure anymore if this is the way to go.

Can someone convince me with some real advantages?

Regards,
Koen