Categorizing plug-ins

Despite what is commonly believed and what I have repeated to several occasions, p2 does allow for the installation of anything, anything being for example just bundles. It just happens that today, with the practices adopted over the years, features have grown to be the primary way of delivering features.

I'm now showing how to create a p2 repository whose category refers to bundles.

Steps:

1. Create a new feature project. This adds the category property to the installable unit, thus allowing the UI to recognize the feature as a category to be displayed.
2. Create a file named p2.inf in the feature project and paste in the following two lines:
   properties.1.name=org.eclipse.equinox.p2.type.category
   properties.1.value=true
   
3. Include the plug-ins you want to see being categorized. This is where you define what goes in the category. Each entry in the plug-ins list will be shown under the category.
   
   
   
4. Remove everything from the build.properties included in the feature. This causes PDE to not generate a feature.jar.
5. Export the feature enabling metadata generation.
   

You can find a zip of this example on the wiki.

Happy categorization, happy provisioning!

p2 is going public

I mean API public. Therefore we are soliciting input from people who have been using our provisional API or people that are looking into using it. To do so, please open a bug report capturing your use cases as well as stating the problems you have been experiencing with the current provisional API.

Thanks in advance.

p2 community contribution

If you are interested in contributing to p2 during the Helios (3.6.) cycle, please add your areas of interest on the wiki. It can either be new functionalities as well as things that you would like to see improved.

Expressing your desire early will allow for other contributors to potentially join you and for the current set of p2 committers to plan for coming contributions.

Thanks in advance.

p2 EclipseCon 09 slides posted

I have just posted the slides for the talk and tutorial I gave on p2 at EclispeCon 2009.

The talk goes over the p2 functionalities from a runtime perspective and the build / dev time aspects.

The tutorial covers all the major aspects of p2. It ranges from the simple usage of product delivery to an in-depth presentation of the p2 concepts.

Enjoy!