Hi all,

With a recent patch, Tycho has achieved a major milestone that allows it to
be a viable replacement to build SimRel repo in place of the very specific
CBI aggregator. Specifically, Tycho now can validate a build plan without
downloading all artifacts, so it can allow the Gerrit patch/CI feedback
short feedback loop.

The principle and benefits of this change consists in getting rid of CBI
aggregator specific files, models, builders... which no-one beyond a few
privileged (?) ones know how to deal with. By moving it to more mainstream
and better known Maven+Tycho+category.xml stack, we allow more people to
participate in the maintenance of the SimRel aggregation; and we also get
rid of one brick to maintain (CBI aggregator) in favor of a well maintained
and active one (Tycho). This will overall result in some resources saving
and SimRel entry-barrier being much lowered.
Of course, there are some features of CBI aggregator that don't have
equivalent in Tycho, and the other way round; sending emails for example
wouldn't be available anymore. But times have changed since the
introduction of CBI aggregator (called b3 back then): CI rose, Code Review
rose, all this DevOps things basically matured and has brought solutions
for the use-case that were directly supported by b3. Not so objectively, I
don't know of any feature of CBI aggregator for SimRel build that we would
really miss when moving to Tycho. I don't the replacement this will either
increase difficulty of contributing to SimRel or to maintain it.

This Gerrit patch shows it in action
https://git.eclipse.org/r/c/simrel/org.eclipse.simrel.build/+/170553 . You
see it adds 1 category.xml file with the content of SimRel, and the list of
p2 repositories in the pom.xml.

I think all that stack is mature enough, and the value/savings in changing
to Tycho is compelling enough to consider this migration for 2021-03.

Cheers,
-- 
Mickael Istria
Eclipse IDE <https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/eclipse-packages/>
developer, for Red Hat Developers <https://developers.redhat.com/>
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