Jeffrey,

Yes as they pointed out I'm moving our responses to the thread to the repository group.

Each project is responsible for their repository contents. So, from this standpoint, if you took Axis for example, the Axis group would be responsible for managing the release of any Axis Eclipse plugin artifacts into the repository. Now, the benefit (or burden) of this is that Axis gets canonical control of managing the distribution of such a plugin and can maintain authority of its release cycle. So ultimately, you should hop onto the Axis list and start a discussion there concerning if they are interested in maintaining the plugin.

Some important facts about the repository.

1.) The repository under www.apache.org/dist/java-repository is only for full releases of apache projects (not nightly/integration builds).
2.) Its is not advised that you point users directly at the above url, but go through any of the many Apache mirrors.
3.) All released artifacts should be signed by author using both PGP and MD5 signatures.


In regards to (2), I'd be interested in seeing how the new mirrors feature of the Eclipse update manager can handle this gracefully.





Jeffrey Liu wrote:

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the clarification. If I understand it correctly, this means potentially I can put plugin distributions into this repository, host a site.xml file somewhere and point to these plugin distributions? Also, this is probably a dumb question, but I'll ask anyways. Who is responsible for putting these release distributions into this repository? Individual projects? Is this done automatically (each build/release)?

Thanks,

Jeffrey Liu
IBM Rational Software - Performance Analyst
IBM Toronto Lab.
8200 Warden Ave. Markham, Ontario, L6G 1C7
Internal mail: D3/R8V/8200/MKM (D3-268)
T/L: 969 3531
Tel: (905) 413 3531
Fax: (905) 413 4920
[EMAIL PROTECTED]




Mark Diggory <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 05/03/2005 03:58 PM
Please respond to
general



To general@incubator.apache.org cc

Subject
Re: Proposal for a centralized Eclipse update manager site for Apache projects/software







Slow down, to clarify, the repository is not just for "Jar's", it is for any release distributions. An Eclipse plugin for, lets say, Ant, would be a distributable, just like any other binary or src distribution in the repository. In Eclipse, a plugin archive is "poorly" prefixed with the extension "jar", it is really a zip archive containing everything for that plugin (from what I understand, this will change in the future and it will truly be a jar, but that is an aside). The repository can hold these files and referencing them using a site.xml could happen from just about anywhere else (such as the project website).


-Mark Diggory


Jeffrey Liu wrote:



Hi Dion,

Thanks for your response. The existing repository won't work. Unlike a Java application, putting JARs on the classpath is not sufficient to make




Eclipse aware of these libraries. Eclipse needs to work with something known as an Eclipse plug-in, which is really the JARs themselves plus a couple XML configuration files. So, in order to make use of the Eclipse update manager, we need to bundle the JARs, the XML configuration files and other files such as license/readme/etc together in the form of an Eclipse plug-in.

Thanks,

Jeffrey Liu
IBM Rational Software - Performance Analyst
IBM Toronto Lab.
8200 Warden Ave. Markham, Ontario, L6G 1C7
Internal mail: D3/R8V/8200/MKM (D3-268)
T/L: 969 3531
Tel: (905) 413 3531
Fax: (905) 413 4920
[EMAIL PROTECTED]




Dion Gillard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 05/03/2005 10:33 AM
Please respond to
general



To general@incubator.apache.org cc

Subject
Re: Proposal for a centralized Eclipse update manager site for Apache projects/software







Is there a reason we can't reuse the existing repository at http://www.apache.org/dist/java-repository/ ?

In your example, Eclipse could be configured to check
http://www.apache.org/dist/java-repository/axis/jars/ for an update?

On 5/3/05, Jeffrey Liu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:




Hi,

I want to propose a centralized Eclipse update manager site for Apache
projects/software. This may not be the correct place to ask this, but I
can find a better place to do it, so I decided to start here. If this is
not the right place, can somebody point me to the correct location?
Thanks! Reason I propose an Eclipse update manager site for Apache
projects/software is because Eclipse projects such as the Web Tools
Platform (WTP) project often reuses software that are provided by





Apache,




for example, Axis, Tomcat, Derby, etc... Often times, these Apache
software are not redistributed by the Eclipse projects, but instead,





they




are listed as prerequisites. This means, end users must first download




the




Eclipse project and all the Apache software prereq by the project, and
configure these software in the Eclipse project before they can get
started. This is error prone and hampers the out-of-the-box experience.
Imagine the following scenario:

A user downloads WTP. Unzip it and starts it up. S/he wants to create an
Axis Web service. S/he launches the wizard that creates a Web service,





but




finds out s/he needs Tomcat and Axis. So s/he opens up her Web browser,
goes to the Apache Web site and looks for the download page for Tomcat





and




Axis. S/he downloads and unzips Tomcat and Axis to the file system. Goes
back to WTP and manually configures Tomcat and Axis into her workspace.
S/he launches the wizard again and move on.

This is easier than said. If there's an Eclipse update manager site for
Apache software, then when the user finds out s/he needs Tomcat and





Axis,




all s/he needs to do now is launch the Eclipse update manager (URL to




the




Apache update site will be preloaded), select Tomcat and Axis and click
Finish. The Eclipse update manager will download, install and configure
Tomcat and Axis automatically. This is much better than asking the user





to




download and configure things manually. Also, this Eclipse update




manager




site is very useful when new versions of a Apache software is available.
For example:

Say Eclipse WTP 1.0 ships with Axis 1.2 support. If later on, Axis
releases a critical fix for Axis 1.2's WSDL2Java emitter, then without





an




update site, we'll need to do one of the following...

1. Rebuild WTP 1.0 with the Axis fix
2. Ask users to manually update WTP
3. Wait for the next version of WTP.

None of the above sound attractive. If there's an Eclipse update manager
site setup for Apache, then end users can search and install new updates
automatically by making just a few clicks. I believe this advances the
integration between open source software that are provided in different
domains (Apache, Eclipse, etc). I think this can benefit the open source
community and can grow the open source ecosystem.

Do I need to propose a new Apache project for something like this?
Suggestions/comments are welcomed.

Thanks,

Jeffrey Liu
IBM Rational Software - Performance Analyst
IBM Toronto Lab.
8200 Warden Ave. Markham, Ontario, L6G 1C7
Internal mail: D3/R8V/8200/MKM (D3-268)
T/L: 969 3531
Tel: (905) 413 3531
Fax: (905) 413 4920
[EMAIL PROTECTED]












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