On Jun 2, 2010, at 8:02 AM, Andrew Niefer wrote:
dash-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 06/01/2010 12:56:57 PM:
> From:
> Miles Parker <milesparker@xxxxxxxxx>
> I've had the same question / issue. What I've discovered is that PDE
> build is so (oddly) orthogonal to feature / plugin build that they
> almost feel disconnected. What actually needs to change I think is
> the PDE infrastructure so that it more closely aligns with the
> plugin / feature build approach.
I'm not quite sure what you are saying here, I suspect the first sentence was intended to say product build is orthogonal to feature/plugin build?
Yes, that's what I meant, thanks.
The productBuild.xml is just a convenient wrapper that generates a feature for you based on your .product file and has a allElements.xml provided for you. It is just a simplification to make things easier.
Right, I wasn't referring to the build artifacts at all. I'm actually referring to the bigger picture here -- how the universe of Eclipse artifacts are organized and defined.
Ultimately a product build _is_ a feature build that defines one additional property:
"product=/path/to/.product"
So that's simply a pointer, but again my point has to do with the broader issue of why that pointer is even needed.
On the actual product design side, which is the only thing that Eclipse developers should have to be concerned with there is a whole lot of other meta-data that is kept in .product.
I have never tried, and I'm not sure what Athena is doing on top of PDE, but I would bet that Athena can build products just by adding the "product" property (assuming you've written an appropriate top level feature).
I bet not, but a bet I would **love** to lose.. :D
> For example, it's still not clear
> to me why instead of the .product and related stuff, products aren't
> simply setup as projects with product spcific meta-data in say a
> product.xml file.
Product specific meta-data is exactly what the .product file is. You can put it in its own project and call it product.xml if you want. But having a wizard to create a new "product project" instead of a new "product configuration" doesn't really change anything.
Yes, that's exactly what I want. Put it in it's own project and call it "product.xml". That's the idea. It would change a lot because it would no longer be this weird situation where a product is tacked on somewhere in the rest of your artifacts with no mapping to a project structure. And it would show up in the standard PDE dialog, etc. etc..
