Genuitec, SAT4J and p2

I'm happy to announce that the Pulse team at Genuitec has signed a contract with the SAT4J team to fund research to provide better explanation support in p2. Yes you heard it right. Genuitec pays the SAT4J team (a research team from the CNRS / University of Lens - France) and the work is benefiting p2!
I'm really excited about that, not only because this will improve p2, but also because Daniel and Anne from the SAT4J team have been working like nuts in the shade for nothing more than... well nothing, and it is a nice recognition of their hard work and commitment.
For the technical part, the difficult aspect of this work is to extract from a set of boolean expressions a minimal set of constraints that make the problem unsatisfiable (aka UNSAT core) and then map that back to user input.
Congrats to the SAT4J team and thank you to Genuitec!

Reworked p2 workflows

I'm happy to announce that last week I-build (I20081014) features reworked p2 workflows. It is currently work in progress and more will be done in 3.5.
What is particularly interesting with this effort, is that it is the result of feedback directly gathered from the community through bugs, definition of personas [1], and meeting with the eclipse UI workgroup [2]. A truly open process and interesting way to design a UI with people from all backgrounds with diametrically opposite ideas on how it should look.
It's not too late to contribute ideas for the evolution of the workflows in 3.5 As usual, any feedback can be given through bugzilla (RT > equinox > p2, be careful we moved), or on the p2-dev mailling list.

[1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox_p2_UI_Use_Cases
[2] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox_p2_User_Interface
Reworked p2 workflows.

Today we officially announced the first SDK I-build including p2.
This is pretty exciting as it is the first deployment outside of our immediate team of our completely new mechanism to install / uninstall and update eclipse-based applications.

For the end-user, the important aspects of this new technology are:
- A brand new UI with simplified workflows
- A 4Mb installer for the SDK, yes 4000Kb
- Bundle pooling limiting downloads by sharing bundles common to multiple products
- Multi-threaded and adaptative download technology
- Transparent handling of mirrors
- The ability to fully provision eclipse (including config files)
- ...

Please note that this is still work in progress and therefore limitations of this first integration will be removed in the coming weeks.

To try it on, get the equinox-p2-sdk-* files, and for the installer get the equinox.p2.installer*.

Also to learn more about p2 join me at EclipseCon for a talk and a BOF.

Enjoy!