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Bug 327053

Summary: [target] [view] Target Platform State feedback
Product: [Eclipse Project] PDE Reporter: Jeff McAffer <jeffmcaffer>
Component: UIAssignee: PDE-UI-Inbox <pde-ui-inbox>
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3 CC: curtis.windatt.public, gunnar
Version: 3.6Keywords: helpwanted
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: PC   
OS: Mac OS X - Carbon (unsup.)   
Whiteboard: stalebug
Bug Depends on:    
Bug Blocks: 403328    

Description Jeff McAffer CLA 2010-10-05 21:07:50 EDT 
The Target Platform State very useful for people who are struggling with their classpaths. This bug suggests a few improvements based on feedback from various teams that have been using it in the wild.

- The name is confusing.  The view shows the whole PDE State including all the bundles from the workspace and the target not just the bundles in the target.

- It would be useful to have a way of filtering or grouping bundles based on whether they are from the workspace or the target.  In a system with hundreds of bundles in the target and tens or hundreds in the workspace this can be a critical factor in navigating the state.

- The view shows package imported by a bundle but not those exported by the bundle and subsequently consumed by other bundles (through imports or requires).  A use case for this is when you want to remove something from the target and need to find all the bundles that depend on it.  Click on a package and find out who is using it. Similarly, click on a bundle and find out what other bundles are depending on it (for whatever reason). 

- There is some confusion over "leaf plugins".  Typically a leaf in a dependency tree/graph is something that does not have any further children. In the state view however it seems that leaves are bundles upon which no one else depends.  Perhaps just a terminology topic.

- Source bundles are really not interesting in this view and should be filtered out. The Leaf view in particular is chock full of source bundles that serve only to obscure the real bundles.
Comment 1 Curtis Windatt CLA 2010-10-07 16:45:58 EDT 
I agree that it is quite annoying to have a target view that displays the workspace plug-ins.  This happens because the view just displays whatever is in the state and we add the workspace plug-ins to that state (there isn't a separate state just for the target plug-ins).
Comment 2 Jeff McAffer CLA 2010-10-08 09:19:37 EDT 
its not always annoying and can be very useful.  The problem seems to be more the combination of 
- the view naming (user thinks they are just seeing the target stuff)
- the absence of filters to control the visibility of the workspace/target bundles

Renaming the view (e/g., PDE State View) and adding filters (show workspace bundles, show target bundles) would likely address 90% of the topics.  Filtering out the source bundles would get another 8% of the topics. 2% left ain't bad :-)
Comment 3 Curtis Windatt CLA 2011-01-31 14:33:30 EST 
Maybe we can try this for M6, but I can't spend much time on it.
Comment 4 Lars Vogel CLA 2019-11-27 07:09:33 EST 
This bug hasn't had any activity in quite some time. Maybe the problem got
resolved, was a duplicate of something else, or became less pressing for some
reason - or maybe it's still relevant but just hasn't been looked at yet.

If you have further information on the current state of the bug, please add it.
The information can be, for example, that the problem still occurs, that you
still want the feature, that more information is needed, or that the bug is
(for whatever reason) no longer relevant.

If the bug is still relevant, please remove the stalebug whiteboard tag.