Question

We are moving our application to the OSGI platform (All developers are using Eclipse) and are trying to figure out the best team environment for developing our bundles.

We have bundles from multiple sources:

1. Common bundles from projects such as Orbit or Apache that are managed by outside agencies.
2. Bundles that wrap domain specific jar files. We manage these bundles internally.
3. Bundles provided by other teams in the company that are effectively read only for us
4. Bundles provided by our team that contain actively developed source code.

In cases 1-3 we would like install in our local Eclipse IDE and provide a target platform. It seems to me we would just create a p2 repository that provides all of the bundles in 1-3 and provide them as a target definition. Feel free to point out a better solution if there is one.

The bundles contained in case 4 are stored in a Mercurial repository. Although the target definition looks like it can grab bundles from several sources it does not address how to include bundles from a (d)vcs.

What is the best practice? Do we put our (d)vcs bundle information in the target platform and just make developers download the correct bundles manually? Also how do we manage changes to the target definition? Do we have to email everyone when it changes, or is there a more elegant solution?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Thanks to everyone who answered for the insight into how others are solving this problem.

We ended up going with Buckminster. It allows us to quickly describe where all our bundles are (cases 1-3 from p2 repositories, case 4 from mercurial) and provides one click setup of empty workspaces through the CQuery. It also integrates well with Hudson and simplifies CI setup compared to the PDE build I have used on other projects.