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Eclipse/Repository retention policy
p2's ability to provision complete products from repositories has made the concept of repositories a first-class citizen of the eclipse ecosystem. People can now use repositories during the build, at development time to setup their target and find missing bundles or simply to setup their IDE. Consequently, repository users expect the content of these repositories to be stable, and it is important to make the retention policy of each repository clearly available.
The following document describes the retention policy used by the Eclipse Project:
- Release repositories: the repository contains all the metadata and artifact of a given release (e.g. Galileo) and no content is ever removed from it. When a new SR is made available the metadata and the artifacts are appended to the existing repository.
- Milestone build repositories: content is expected to stay until the release is complete.
- Integration build repositories: content is expected to stay until the milestone is complete, but can be disposed at any time.
- Nightly build repositories: content can be disposed at any time.
Though specific to the Eclipse platform team, these rules are general enough that we encourage any other team producing repositories to follow them.
See also: Eclipse_Project_Update_Sites