The discussion on this thread has been interesting and useful. I took the liberty of adding the following to the wiki page. It captures things that we have been doing in our projects for some time and overlaps with some of the points raised previously.
6) Bundle developer (Added by Jeff after the meeting)
* Gathers together a mess of "SDKs" from EclipseRT projects and elsewhere. These include runtime binary bundles as well as source bundles.
* May use Software Sites but likely does not want to follow dependencies as typical SDK features are more like kitchen sinks than precise runtime configurations.
* Wants to have multiple simultaneous and likely conflicting sets of bundles (e.g., Carbon and Cocoa, RAP and RCP, ...)
* Would likely love to have per project target platforms as a replacement/augmentation for the Automated Management of Dependencies support
* Wants to share his target
* May want to lock the target to specific versions or may want it to float to latest in the given repo. Perhaps on a per bundle or feature basis
* Definitely wants to add individual bundles from Software Sites
* Likely needs to add dirs of bundles and features by unzipping zip's etc.
* May or may not care which repo bundles come from
* Want some nice shorthand for lists of bundles to deal with build and p2 integration. Current features are heavy-weight (project based, lots of cruft, ...)
To get a feel for and environment like this take a look at the Toast Examples project (
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Toast). There we do client and server, RCP and RAP, ... all in the same workspace with the same target. There is interesting p2 integration etc etc.
Basically I encourage the PDE team to try living the life of a Toast developer (i.e., a Bundle developer) and ensure that the required workflows are retained and enhanced. I am more than happy to work with the team to explain how things fit together. Just let me know.
Jeff