p2 at OSGi DevCon Europe / Jazoon

If everything goes well (understand my travel request gets approved), I will be presenting p2 at OSGi DevCon Europe / Jazoon in Zurich on June 22nd.

If you want to meet to chat about p2, build or OSGi, please drop me a note (esp. if you are an IBM Rational customer) and we will schedule something during my short visit in Switzerland.

What is the Galileo repo?

The Galileo repository is a one stop shop for all the bits and pieces of this release and thus facilitates consumers life. It guarantees by construction that all the pieces that are available from it are meant to work together.

However, this does not mean that you will be able to select all the entries from the repository and successfully install them on top your SDK. Why? Because this repository contains things like SDKs and runtimes (e.g. Riena, Swordfish, etc.) that are meant to be installed in your target rather than your running instance.

p2, call for community testing

During 3.5, a release put under the theme of robustness for our team, p2 went through a lot of changes: new UI, improved error reporting, more robust downloads, improved transactionality of the installation,.. the list is endless. About 900 bugs have been closed.

However, in order to avoid releasing 3.5 with big issues (which we think/hope we don't have), I'm calling out to you to try out p2 by downloading RC1 and give it a spin and a hard time, and report any problem in the p2 component here.

Thanks in advance.

p2 related projects for GSOC

I have added a few new projects to the Google Summer of Code idea page relating to p2. This brings the count of p2 related projects to 4. If you are a student and want to sign up for any of these topics or submit new ideas, feel free to do so. But don't forget to voice your interest on soc-dev@eclipse.org.

To cut down the search through the proliferation of idea here are the 4 p2 topics:

Web triggered installation

The goal of this project is to develop a mechanism by which the installation of a plug-in can be triggered from a single click on a webpage, thus facilitating the extension of eclipse for non typical users. Some of the challenges of this project are: communication with the running instances of eclipse, identification and presentation of running eclipse instances, "security".

Provisioning OSGi clouds

With very clearly defined boundaries between its different components, p2 offers a lot of possibilities when it comes to set it up in a multi-tiered provisioning system. The goal of this project is to provide a configuration of p2 that can be used to deploy OSGi-based applications on the cloud. This will include the creation of an Equinox EC2 image, exploration on how configurations can be managed, and also how to leverage the cloud storage capabilities.

Power-user p2 views

The current Eclipse p2 Update UI is targeted to both Eclipse SDK users and end-users of Eclipse-based products. Since the UI must support users with less knowledge than the typical Eclipse SDK user, the end result is a wizard-style (modal), task-based approach. Many power users, in particular Linux users, prefer a modeless, "dashboard" style of interaction. The current p2 "Admin UI" is targeted toward p2 developers who need to see every detail of the underlying p2 model objects. There is a need for something in between these two extremes. Users have mentioned Linux package management front ends such as Synaptic Package Manager as appropriate UIs for this audience. If appropriate, this UI could replace the p2 admin UI, but it's not clear if that should be the goal.

Debugging aid for p2 installation issues

Debugging cases where features cannot be installed into Eclipse due to inability to reconcile requirements of existing features and the new features being installed is quite challenging. It would be useful to create a tool for capturing the details of the environment and what was being installed to aid in reporting problems. Once it is possible to generate these dumps, a graphical explorer tool that would allow the developers to trace the dependencies and see the problems would make it significantly easier to debug these problems.