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!

A place for committers to roam together

Among others, two topics regularly come back in various forums
- diversity in the participation of a project
- common components / code duplication

In my opinion, one of the reason for these problems is the absence of communication / communication medium between the actual doers, the committers, thus leaving each of them ignorant of what others are doing and the problems they are facing, solving, etc.

What I would like to have is a place for committers to be able to ask technical questions, exchange ideas, etc. thus giving them an opportunity to discover common interests and help building a stronger sense of fellowship.

Is this place eclipse.org-committers@eclipse.org mailing list? Anyway if such a place exist, we need to make sure everyone knows about it and is not shy about sharing and if it is not we should experiment with it. Please comment on bug 205572.

The equinox provisioning effort now has a name

This afternoon team meeting gave the "equinox provisioning effort" the cool snappy name of

P2

Yes, you read it right the letter P, then the number 2. It can stands for the followings in no particular order:
- Provisioning Platform
- Provisioning Partout (partout is the french word for everywhere)
- Pascal's Provisioning (hey, why not? We do have the "Ed Merks Framework")
- Provisioning, the 2nd generation

The bundles and packages will be renamed right after M2 has been delivered.

The motivations behind this renaming can be found at http://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox_Provisioning_Naming.