There's been a lot of bashing of p2 lately by blogs on Planet Eclipse. They seem to revolve around the lack of support for extension locations. I've never used extension locations, and I hate the fact that for whatever reason you would need to manage installs yourself by hacking around the file system.
p2, IMHO, is awesome. It manages installs as good as any install management system I've seen. It tracks versions, it manages dependencies with capabilities which is absolutely the right way to do it. It allows you to install things other than eclipse plug-ins thanks to the extensibility provides by touch points and repositories. When we're done you'll be able to everything your favorite install manager can do and more. From where I sit p2 will change the install industry.
So yeah, extension locations aren't supported any more. And I'm probably not the best person to speak on whether losing them matters. But someone needs to stand up for p2 because it is much needed. And I'm sure you can live without extension locations. I think the worse mistake was providing them to begin with.
One simple question then. I hear a lot about how P2 maintains a pool of installed plugins and that you can reuse this pool and that it has profiles, etc. But how do I access all that functionality ?
ReplyDeleteI've been upgrading along with Ganymede since M5 and I generally install both the EPP Java release and the RCP release (for two different projects). I need SVN support so I want to install Subversive. Without extension locations and any information about this pool stuff, I've had to add the the Subversive update sites and install Subversive at least 4 times now.
How can I prevent having to reinstall my plugins with every new release or individual Eclipse installation ?
Please help me understand what replaces the loss of multiple extension locations in this use case: I have a pre-defined set of plug-ins that are installed on my workstation in a read-only location; I don't get to modify that directory. However, I do want to install plug-ins locally. In addition, I use multiple workspaces, each of which uses a subset of plug-ins for a variety of reasons.
ReplyDeleteMy major concern with p2 is not just that is completly ignores how many used to maintain multible Eclipse installations, while sharing large parts of it. It is that it was 'sneaked' in so late in the 3.4 milestones that it is now too late to fix any functionality issues a lot of us have.
ReplyDeleteAge: I (guess) P2 has all the functionality, there is just no UI (yet). What makes me wonder why something as massive as P2 is added that late in the development cycle, I mean M7 was supposed to be feature complete. I can't quite see that with P2.
ReplyDeleteA lot of pain and no gain.
ReplyDeleteP2 is a nice idea but unlike anyone else, I could never get it to work. The installer will always crash when I try a shared install. With a non-shared install, it will timeout during the download and refuse to continue.
So my summary is: I've tried four versions of p2 and none of them worked long enough to get to the point where I could start Eclipse. I kind of gave up on it, at least for 3.4.
Doug, old update manager allowed to specify extension location when installing from remote update sites and also allowed to import already installed extension locations. So, there isn't really any "hacking" around file system.
ReplyDeletei for one welcome our P2 overlords.
ReplyDeleteI for one hope p2 gets removed in 3.4.1
ReplyDelete