Re: [orbit-dev] Impact for Orbit of recent PDE and Tycho extensions to c

[Roland Grunberg <rgrunber@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2021-01-14 at 11:26 +0100, Lars Vogel wrote:
> Dear Orbit committers,
> 
> With the recent option added to Tycho and PDE [see 1 and 2] to
> consume
> Maven artifacts directly it looks like the Eclipse projects could
> move
> to consume libraries directly instead of consuming it from Orbit.
> 
> Is that supported by the rules of the foundation?

I think as long as some project has filed the initial CQ and all other
projects adopt the new license plugin to generate their IPlog, then it
should be fine. This should probably be brought up with the Eclipse
Foundation legal team though so they are aware.

> What does that mean for Orbit?

This would eliminate the need to push things into Orbit for a lot of
libraries where the OSGi metadata requires no modification. In the case
of modifications needed I believe it's also planned to provide that
through a bnd file similar to what orbit-recipes uses. There are of
course some features that don't quite overlap but arguably shouldn't be
allowed (eg. combining multiple artifacts into one bundle).

It remains to be seen how signing will be handled assuming projects
will be shipping the 3rd party content into update sites. There may
also be some coordination that needs to happen in places like simrel to
ensure projects contributing the same library use don't push different
qualifiers of it.

I'm also not sure how source bundles would fit into this.

Either way, I think many of these changes will be gradual where the
fallback would still be Orbit for things not yet fully supported.

Also, in the course of writing this I was just thinking of the
about.html file that makes its way into each of the 3rd party libraries
we ship as bundles. This would likely need to be provided as well.

Cheers,
-- 
Roland Grunberg