[Pluginbuilder-development] p2.gathering

[mbarchfe <mba...@go...>]

Hi,

I just want to give you a short update of the latest changes in trunk. The cause was to add categories to the p2 repository. Without categories the update manager of Eclipse 3.5 complains about "There are no categorized items" and the user has to uncheck "Group items by category" in order to see the features.

Categories can be added by enabling p2.gathering and by setting p2.category.definition to a category.xml file. That is easy, but there are ramifications. With p2.gathering the build does not create archives for features anymore. Instead, the features are published to the p2 repository. The problem: the archives are needed for deploying the features into the test host (with the standalone update manager). I pondered two solutions: 
1) extract the archives from the repository and go on with the update manager
2) install the features into the test host using the p2 director instead of the update manager

I decided to go for the second option. One reason being that the director will replace the update manager sooner or later anyway.

I think that p2.gathering has further potential to simplify the build with pluginbuilder. At the time being there are two build runs: the first run creates the feature archives (and the old style update site) whereas the second (optional) run creates the RCP configurations. With p2.gathering the RCP configurations can also be published into a repository. I guess this would make the first run useless. However, an additional task is necessary to export the archives from the repository.

I won't touch this in the near future. Just an idea.

cheers
Markus