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Bug 455289

Summary: Allow uninstalling non root features
Product: [Eclipse Project] Equinox Reporter: Michael Scharf <eclipse>
Component: p2Assignee: P2 Inbox <equinox.p2-inbox>
Status: RESOLVED INVALID QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3 CC: gunnar, mknauer, pascal
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
Bug Depends on:    
Bug Blocks: 455363    

Description Michael Scharf CLA 2014-12-15 21:31:31 EST 
Bundling features is a great way to organize features. The problem is that child features cannot be uninstalled. But it would be great if it was impossible to uninstall child features.

see Bug 435681#c1 and a question in stack overflow 
   http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27489852/uninstall-mylyn-from-eclipse-luna
Comment 1 Pascal Rapicault CLA 2014-12-16 12:15:44 EST 
In most circumstances, this would not work or it would cause confusion to the user because the outer most feature usually requires items from the inner feature (e.g. jdt to platform)
Now the specific case you highlight would work but this is only because the top level entry is a product that plays an aggregator role (and you know that because you know all about Eclipse :)) 
IMO, this specific problem is a packaging problem where the package maintainer has made the choice to not allow for Mylyn to be uninstallable. Given that installing multiple items as a root is supported in Tycho, I have opened bug 455363.

Keeping this bug open since the enhancement is valid.
Comment 2 Gunnar Wagenknecht CLA 2014-12-16 12:21:33 EST 
(In reply to Pascal Rapicault from comment #1)
> IMO, this specific problem is a packaging problem where the package
> maintainer has made the choice to not allow for Mylyn to be uninstallable.

I'm not sure this was a choice done on purpose. Do you have any recommendation on changing the product/feature structure for packages to solve the issue?
Comment 3 Markus Knauer CLA 2014-12-16 16:58:46 EST 
(In reply to Pascal Rapicault from comment #1)
> Given that installing multiple items as a root is supported in Tycho, ...

Since Tycho 0.20 [1]

(In reply to Gunnar Wagenknecht from comment #2)
> I'm not sure this was a choice done on purpose. ...

When we created this new package structure some years ago it was the only working choice, which is (was) probably not the best structure of the packages from today's perspective.


[1] https://wiki.eclipse.org/Tycho/Release_Notes/0.20
Comment 4 Pascal Rapicault CLA 2014-12-16 17:03:46 EST 
@mknauer, I've proposed a different structure in bug 455363
This is just a starting point to discuss.
Comment 5 Pascal Rapicault CLA 2015-03-31 21:24:19 EDT 
Closing since it comes down to a product packaging discussion.