Niclas Hedhman wrote:
On Wednesday 04 May 2005 04:12, Jeffrey Liu wrote:
I want to propose a centralized Eclipse update manager site for Apache
projects/software. Reason I propose an Eclipse update manager site for
Apache projects/software
IIUYC, and perhaps others have not expressed this distinctly enough;
It should be a lot less effort to ask Eclipse to support Maven styled
repositories as well as its own system. By doing so, you get what I think you
are fishing for, without the need for every Apache and SF.net project to
publish their respective artifacts in Eclipse specific format.
Thats a little pretentious, so Eclipse should support Maven, but not the
other way around? This is not about "every" Apache project having to
release Eclipse plugin format, just those that want to. Its trivial for
a project to organize an artifact directory for Eclipse
plugins/features. And doing so promotes more interoperability between
the two.
A simple directory structure for eclipse artifacts:
/maven/axis/site.xml
/maven/axis/plugins/<plugin>.jar
/maven/axis/features/<feature>.jar
or
/maven/axis/eclipse/site.xml
/maven/axis/eclipse/plugins/<plugin>.jar
/maven/axis/eclipse/features/<feature>.jar
On top of that, people over at the DPML (www.dpml.net) are working on
providing Maven repository support for Eclipse, by leveraging the Transit
sub-project which is capable of referencing artifacts (i.e. content) on
Maven-styled organized (and others) repositories.
Example;
URL url = new URL( "artifact:jar:tomcat/catalina#5.5.9" );
InputStream in = url.openStream();
and the catalina-5.5.9.jar will be searched on the configured repositories.
The Eclipse support effort is basically a matter of registration of the
artifact: protocol to the OSGi network subsystem, and overcoming Eclipse's
inability to use URLs instead of almost always requiring files :o( , so it
will take quite a long time before those guys reach all the way we want.
In any event, when the external Jar reference is created, the artifact: URI
could be used, and with proper support in Eclipse, I think this is a
non-issue for ASF projects.
Cheers
Niclas
Yes, thats very elegant, I hope that they are talking with Eclipse folks
and OSGi folk, or at least reviewing the specification to establish if
common strategies already exist there. But, thats a long way down the
road to interoperability. What's hoped for here is a place to store
plugin and feature artifacts for an apache project "now". It is not
think it much to ask...This IS what Maven was designed to be capable of
doing. If one wants to publish their own custom distributable, they can
configure Maven to do so.
-Mark
