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Bug 342552

Summary:	verify and fix behavior and irritations with automatically generated manifests
Product:	[RT] Virgo	Reporter:	Martin Lippert <mlippert>
Component:	tooling	Assignee:	Project Inbox <virgo-inbox>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	P3	CC:	charliemax, eclipse, glyn.normington, mlippert
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Mac OS X - Carbon (unsup.)
Whiteboard:
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	368782

Description Martin Lippert

2011-04-12 07:53:36 EDT

There are a number of users reporting problems and irritations with the automatic generation of manifests. Take a look here, for example:

https://issuetracker.springsource.com/browse/STS-1207

Comment 1 Miles Parker

2012-01-16 18:09:12 EST

The bug description is really vague :) and the attached bug is marked as a WONT_FIX. Can we close this? Otherwise we need reporting users to provide more specifics.

Comment 2 Glyn Normington

2012-01-17 06:53:57 EST

STS-1207 was only marked as WONT_FIX because the bug had been captured here. Feel free to re-open that bug if you need to try to engage the raiser.

I think it would be reasonable for this bug to cover STS-1207 only because otherwise it's much too vague.

Comment 3 Miles Parker

2012-01-17 12:50:28 EST

OK, understood.

But wait, looking at original bug, it seems that the user is reacting to the fact that with automatic updating, manual changes are written over. Isn't this unavoidable? :)

Comment 4 Glyn Normington

2012-01-18 03:42:13 EST

(In reply to comment #3)
> OK, understood.
> 
> But wait, looking at original bug, it seems that the user is reacting to the
> fact that with automatic updating, manual changes are written over. Isn't this
> unavoidable? :)

The current behaviour of bundlor under Eclipse is to merge automatic updates with manual changes to the manifest. Whether this *really* makes sense or not is quite another matter. It might be better to wean the users off that rather confusing way of working and encourage them always to work with the template so we can freely blat the manifest when we regenerate it. But we need to tread a little carefully so we don't break a feature that some users might be perfectly happy with. Ultimately, it's your call as you get into the tooling properly.

Comment 5 Miles Parker

2012-01-18 12:51:22 EST

OK, thanks Glyn. Coming from the perspective of code generation tools -- which is really when you get down to it what the bundlor mechanism seems to be -- is that there are inherent problems with mixing the two. To preserve correctness, you really need some concept of protected regions; something that would be difficult to achieve given the peculiarities of the .MF format. My knee-jerk reaction would be to legislate "use one or the other but not both". Comments from community are of course welcome.