Good question. Actually right now there are three catalogs, one for each of 1.1, 1.1.1, and 1.2-SNAPSHOT. When 1.2 is released I expect that its catalog will replace the 1.2-SNAPSHOT catalog. I don't think that maintaining multiple catalogs is ideal and we will probably want to converge them into one if possible.
However, at this time the main reason for multiple catalogs is because the plugins are not compatible across Geronimo releases, at least the ones I tried. Since the supported geronimo versions is a property of each plugin, and not the other way around, a consolidated plugin catalog would need to contain a separate entry for each version of the plugin. Loading this catalog into the plugin portlet produces a confusing looking UI, where multiple entries are listed for each plugin but some are grayed out as being unavailable with no obvious indication as to why. Another reason is because the plugin versions are hosted at different repositories. We may be able to work around that by including a <default-repository> element in the catalog for each repository, but I haven't looked closely at how that works yet. And finally another reason is because it seems like it will be pretty straightforward to enhance geronimo's build process to create the catalog for a release. I think this will basically entail concatenating all the geronimo-plugin.xml files in the config tree with a little additional munging. But I don't think there's a good way to perform this *across* releases. Not trying to overwhelm you with justifications, just want to be as transparent as possible since I'm really thinking through this as I go along and want to gather feedback :-) To avoid maintaining multiple catalogs we may very well want to tackle some of these issues right now. Jason had some excellent ideas earlier in this thread about how to maintain the catalog(s) in maven and I definitely think that's where we should be headed, along with some parallel enhancements to the UI and CLI. Best wishes, Paul On 10/4/06, Guillaume Nodet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Just a question. What is the need for two plugin catalogs ? I thought plugins could tell which geronimo version they can be deployed to.
