Re: [equinox-dev] [prov] Comments on wiki "Equinox p2 Shared Install Pla

["Alex Blewitt" <alex.blewitt@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Dec 18, 2007 2:00 AM, Jeff McAffer <Jeff_McAffer@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hey James, this is alot of good information.  Would you have a chance to
> update the shared install scenarios document to highlight some of the
> points?  My gut feeling from reading your comments is that most of what you
> suggest is do-able wrt the underlying infrastructure but the current context
> is driving Andrew et al to express things in a different way (that may or
> may not line up with your situations).

I did a search for p2 on the wiki.eclipse.org and failed to find
anything, so apologies for not reading the shared install document.

One thing that would be great for Mac is to have two sets of bundles;
a global (i.e. multi-user) directory, and a per-user directory for
storing bundles. The normal place to put these would be e.g.
/Library/Application Support/Eclipse/Bundles (or plugins) and for a
per-user view, ~/Library/Application Support/Eclipse/Bundles. I don't
know if the support exists at the moment to have a hierarchical set of
bundle repositories like this (nor do I know what the correct terms
are; apologies) but the idea would be that a user could install their
latest FooBar plugin into their own one without affecting everyone
else. I guess the same distinction would be the case for Linux/Unix
users; e.g. /usr/share/eclipse/plugins and ~/.eclipse/plugins might be
appropriate.

The only problem would be writing; all of the mutable data should
really be stored in the ~/Library/Application Support/Eclipse area.
There are issues at the moment with the Mac Eclipse.app launcher,
since if it's dragged-and-dropped into (say) /Applications, it has a
nasty tendency to extract eclipse.exe (or local equivalent) into an
area that it's not supposed to write to.

Lastly, if multi-repository bundles are permitted, then perhaps a
default set could be placed in
Eclipse.app/Contents/Resources/Java/Bundles. That would allow a simple
drag-and-drop of the Eclipse.app in its entirety to a location on
disk.

Are the ideas of hierarchical repositories of bundles supported in p2?

Alex