#8 Target Platform as build artifact

[Markus Barchfeld]

The Packaging support feature (https://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?func=detail&aid=2504238&group_id=188226&atid=924464) would easily allow to create a target platform as build artifact.
Usually the target platform is created manually. This task can become tedious, if the contained plug-ins should be chosen fine grained. E.g. if you want to use only a subset of the target platform. You could define a reduced platform feature and then use the packaging support to create the target platform consisting of that feature and any other features you need. The only prerequisite is that the Eclipse host from which the packaging is started (let's call it packaging host) must contain these features.

Pluginbuilder now creates the build host by extracting an Eclipse SDK and adding features (e.g. EMF SDK) to it. This could be replaced with the following steps:
1) Create a packaging host (Eclipse SDK + features/plugins)
2) Use packaging support to create a target platform
3) Start the build with the Eclipse SDK and baseLocation set to the target platform

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Sounds great :) I think this might eliminate the hacking I'm currently doing to the Ant script to add third party bundles to the eclipseextension/eclipse/plugins directory (necessary for my plugins to compile). -Andrew