At 04:58 PM 9/7/2005, Andrew Niefer wrote:
I have started looking at what would need to be done in order to build Eclipse plugins using Maven 2.
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The install phase would be different from the normal m2 install. We would need to gather the jars and any additional resources into the standard eclipse features & plugins directories. I have not yet looked into this.
Andrew, I'm not sure that I agree with your assessment concerning the requirement to gather the jars and any additional resources into the standard eclipse features and plugins directories. As an example of variant Eclipse configurations, whenever a new version of Ant is released, I always download the new version, remove the old Ant version's jars from my ANT_HOME/lib directory, and install the new version's jars. Then I navigate into the Eclipse preferences for the Ant runtime, and set the references to the necessary jars to the jars in my ANT_HOME/lib. That has worked numerous times without a problem and I have done it more than once, replacing the previous jars that I had referenced with newer ones, or upgrading the Ant versions in the varying versions of Eclipse as they have changed over time. My activities aren't automated, but they could easily be.
Certainly one would expect that the Eclipse Foundation and its personnel would have and follow standard installation conventions but I don't see why they must be viewed as sacred. What would seem to be important, from a purely configuration oriented perspective, is that there are well defined default conventions and that in addition to them there may be alternate configuration practices that can be deployed in an automated manner to produce differing but still desirable Eclipse configurations.
In fact, if the Eclipse Foundation hasn't already taken steps to do so, the creation of automated installation procedures to create multiple initial configurations might be a value addition to the Eclipse tool set. I know that I have read about non-Eclipse Foundation people doing this to support their own development requirements.
Lastly, one of the main values of Maven is its ability to organize and manage development artifacts and maintain them as configuration items. Maven manages its configuration items at a much finer level of granularity than does Eclipse, and again there might be value for the Eclipse product line to move toward Maven's conventions rather than vice versa.
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