Equinox/p2/Multiple Agents

In the Ganymede and Galileo releases, p2 used a service model that assumed all services were singletons. In particular, the API and implementation assumed there would only ever be one planner, director, engine, metadata repository manager, etc, available at any given time. This was reinforced through use of helper classes such as ServiceHelper that performed simple OSGi service lookups without providing any context that would allow for a particular instance among multiple available instances to be selected.

This "singleton" service model is very limiting because it requires a separate VM/framework to be forked if another p2-managed system is to be manipulated. For example if PDE wants to manipulate a target platform, or a build system wants to export/provision into a separate system, it cannot be done in the same process.