Hi Package Maintainers,
today I want to make you aware of some important changes that were discussed on this and other mailing lists and in Bugzilla. I'd like to move forward with all of them in order to get early feedback from you as package maintainers and from our users, and will try to include the required changes in the next Mars M5 milestone in about two weeks.
Some package maintainers had already decided that the new automated error reporting allows to gain more knowledge about errors that happen in the field, and that it is worth having this feature in their package. Now I think it is time to integrate this in all packages to get even more feedback and error reports.
At the moment this component is developed from the Code Recommenders project team but I hope to move this to EPP in the long run.
In December I wrote in [2]: "...that was on my wish list for a long time: The addition of Oomph [1] to
all EPP packages. It's now a mature project at Eclipse.org and will be
part of the Mars Simultaneous Release. My
hope is that it will solve many of the problems that we are discussing
since many years, e.g. it would ask the user in a wizard for his/her
preferred file encoding (UTF-8?) when Eclipse is started for the first
time, it can synchronise your preferences between workspaces, it solves
the problem with a target definition, ... and a lot more."
I'm using it myself and is another addition to all packages.
What we've seen again with last week's SR1a security update: Only a few people are using "check for updates" in Eclipse and by default it is still disabled. To make it easier for us to push updates to our users, we need to make sure that this option is enabled.
No Gerrit change (yet), but I'd like to experiment a bit with the RCP/RAP package in the next milestone. If these experiments turn out to be interesting for all packages, we need to come up with a proposal for a structural change. If other packages are interested to experiment with this, please let me know on the bug.
The short description: All packages are using a single EPP package feature that defines the package content, but "check for updates" only searches for updates of this root feature, *not* its child features. As a result of this child features are only updated if and only if there is an update available for the EPP package root feature. The same is true if someone wants to remove a feature. Because all installed features are part of the main dependency chain it is not possible to remove a specific feature.
The proposed solution: Move some/all features of a package from the EPP package feature to the product configuration and make them root features.
Thanks and regards,
Markus