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Bug 319085

Summary: Set up tools to facilitate creation of features for feature-based products
Product: [Eclipse Project] PDE Reporter: Mickael Istria <mistria>
Component: UIAssignee: PDE-UI-Inbox <pde-ui-inbox>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3 CC: bartoszpop, darin.eclipse, jeffmcaffer, manuel.selva, mariot.chauvin
Version: 3.7   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: PC   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:

Description Mickael Istria CLA 2010-07-07 04:25:35 EDT
See Manuel Selva's blog and comments: http://manuelselva.wordpress.com/2010/07/07/plugin-product-vs-feature-product/

The conclusion is that a button like "Add Required Plug-ins" would be very useful to configure feature-based product.

It could be a "Define features" button that would open a wizard to create some features (with a "Create feature YYY from dependencies of feature YYY" magic button) to use in the product definition...
Comment 1 Darin Wright CLA 2010-07-12 14:48:07 EDT
I think this would go against the style of re-using existing features/plug-ins. The bundles you need for you application may already be included in other features, and could be added as required features (of course, the trick is knowing which features you need). As well, you can define a feature to require other plug-ins (import them). For example, on the dependencies tab of the feature editor you can compute required plug-ins. This will add import statements for the plug-ins.
Comment 2 Manuel Selva CLA 2010-07-15 03:07:45 EDT
Hi Darin,

The solution consisting in adding all the features we need has one main drawback: we often don't need ALL the plugins of these features, and thus our exported product will contain a lot of useless stuff.

Regarding the compute required plugins of the feature dependencies tab, i guess you are mentioning the "Compute" button ? I just tried it, and it seems this button just add direct (first level of dependency) required plugins. Do you confirm ?

On a side note: someone pointed me to the File -> New -> New feature project wizard that is able to create a feature from a launch configuration.
Comment 3 Mickael Istria CLA 2010-10-21 05:16:20 EDT
Darin,

I'm getting back on all that stuff (moving from plugin-based product to feature-based), and here is my opiniion about re-using of features:

Most of features shipped by Eclipse.org project are made for the grain of Eclipse IDE. They often mix core and UI, whereas product editor often want to have the core without the UI.
This mix-up is the main reason why we cannot easily re-use features: the UI can quickly become polluted because we added a useless (for our product) UI plugin.
Having re-usable features would indeed be very nice, but I think that it is almost impossible to write a feature that will satisfy all re-use use case, that's why we need to redefine our features. And I discovered that it is not so easy to define features without missing some bundles.
Comment 4 Darin Wright CLA 2010-10-21 10:32:54 EDT
Perhaps this could be incorporated in the "Feature Project Creation Wizard"? Some option to seed the initial set of bundles?
Comment 5 Mickael Istria CLA 2010-10-21 10:51:19 EDT
I'm not exactly sure of what would be the best, but it seems to me that I don't get a lot of issues when creating a feature.
The difficulty comes when trying to maintain a feature:
* When removing one plugin, it is almost impossible to figure out which other plugins of the features are in the feature because they are dependency of this plugin only. Then I don't know what else I can remove
* When adding a bundle, I'd like to be able to add its dependencies without having to list them all.