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Difference between revisions of "Equinox/p2/Location selection scenarios"

< Equinox‎ | p2
(Select Bundle Pool on Install)
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It is mainly motivated by user control to help driving user satisfaction. If you take control away from a user, it will make him/her unhappy. Therefore, a user should be able to keep control over the layout/organization of software on his computer. Additionally, the concept of extension locations has been well adopted within Eclipse. For example, PDE allows to compose plug-ins in wizards, dialogs and editors by grouping plug-ins based on their install locations.
 
It is mainly motivated by user control to help driving user satisfaction. If you take control away from a user, it will make him/her unhappy. Therefore, a user should be able to keep control over the layout/organization of software on his computer. Additionally, the concept of extension locations has been well adopted within Eclipse. For example, PDE allows to compose plug-ins in wizards, dialogs and editors by grouping plug-ins based on their install locations.
  
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=== Mac OS X layout ===
  
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The current Eclipse.app is pretty badly laid out for Mac OS X systems, as is the location of the bundles. Macs have several hierarchies of places where things can be expected to be placed/read from:
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* /Network/Library/''Equinox/Bundles'' - shared across multiple computers, probably read-only
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* /Library/''Equinox/Bundles'' - shared across multiple users on the current computer, probably read-only
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* ~/Library/''Equinox/Bundles'' - accessible by the current user, probably read-write
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Although it should be possible to define these as 'dropins', there doesn't seem to be any easy/obvious way to have multiple such directories.
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There's a bunc of secondary issues for the Mac bundle, such as that everything it needs should be inside the Eclipse.app rather than dropped outside it; and logs shouldn't be written inside, but rather outside in ~/Library/Logs. P2 is somewhat inflexible and assumes a wrietable location for the application isnatll folder when extracting e.g. configuration.ini. Even if that directory is writable (e.g. running with admin priviledges) it should defer to some per-user location instead. (The common argument - that we want to install multiple different versions of Eclipse - is almost completely unnecessary when running as a 'normal' user, but rather something that Eclipse developers might do more frequently.)
  
 
[[Category:Equinox p2]]
 
[[Category:Equinox p2]]

Revision as of 14:33, 2 January 2009

This page tries to collect scenarios and use cases for controlling the various locations used by p2. This includes managing the location initial location of a profile, p2's data area, shared locations, the location into which additional function is installed and the relationship to the bundle pool etc.

Each details a scenario and is followed by one or more approaches. In some cases the scenario is not currently supported and a bug report may be listed.

Install

Select Bundle Pool on Install

<Note: This needs to be recast as a scenario. Why would they be unhappy? What are they expecting when setting this location?>

It should be possible to select the target bundle pool when installing plug-ins in Eclipse. The functionality can be compared to selecting an extension location when installing plug-ins prior to Equinox p2.

It is mainly motivated by user control to help driving user satisfaction. If you take control away from a user, it will make him/her unhappy. Therefore, a user should be able to keep control over the layout/organization of software on his computer. Additionally, the concept of extension locations has been well adopted within Eclipse. For example, PDE allows to compose plug-ins in wizards, dialogs and editors by grouping plug-ins based on their install locations.

Mac OS X layout

The current Eclipse.app is pretty badly laid out for Mac OS X systems, as is the location of the bundles. Macs have several hierarchies of places where things can be expected to be placed/read from:

  • /Network/Library/Equinox/Bundles - shared across multiple computers, probably read-only
  • /Library/Equinox/Bundles - shared across multiple users on the current computer, probably read-only
  • ~/Library/Equinox/Bundles - accessible by the current user, probably read-write

Although it should be possible to define these as 'dropins', there doesn't seem to be any easy/obvious way to have multiple such directories.

There's a bunc of secondary issues for the Mac bundle, such as that everything it needs should be inside the Eclipse.app rather than dropped outside it; and logs shouldn't be written inside, but rather outside in ~/Library/Logs. P2 is somewhat inflexible and assumes a wrietable location for the application isnatll folder when extracting e.g. configuration.ini. Even if that directory is writable (e.g. running with admin priviledges) it should defer to some per-user location instead. (The common argument - that we want to install multiple different versions of Eclipse - is almost completely unnecessary when running as a 'normal' user, but rather something that Eclipse developers might do more frequently.)

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