Tycho/Glossary

This page describes some important terms and concepts of Tycho.

Dependency Resolution

During dependency resolution, Tycho matches the references to bundles, packages, etc. in the project's sources (MANIFEST.MF, feature.xml, etc.) with the target platform and the other projects built in the same reactor.

Reactor

The Maven reactor, i.e. everything that is built together in the same mvn call.

Target Definition Files

With the target definition file format, one can select a set of bundles and features from one or more p2 repositories. The same target definition file (or "target file" in short) can be used to define both the target platform for the Eclipse PDE, as well as the target platform in Tycho.

Target Platform

The target platform is the set of artifacts against which the project resolves its dependencies. There are different ways to define the target platform; the most common ones are repositories with layout=p2, which add an entire repository to the target platform, or target definition files for more fine-grained control. Each module has its own target platform, although with the normal configuration inheritance in Maven, the target platforms often have identical content.