on Dec 10th, 2010Updating Target Platforms
Target platforms are a mechanism in PDE that allows developers to identify the set of bundles and features that will be available to their application. You can then write bundles and compile against those in the target, define features/products based on target bundles, and run or export using those target bundles. Very powerful and convenient.
With the evolution of p2, you can define target platforms in terms of Software Sites. That is, you can point at p2 repositories and select particular versions of features to be used in your applications. Even more powerful and convenient. Now another step.
Starting with Eclipse 3.7M4 there is an Update button in the target management UI. Simply select the features and software sites you want to update and let PDE discover newer versions.
One of the coolest usage patterns this enables is targeting your builds. Simply setup your build system to publish its output into a p2 repository and then add that repo to your target and pick the relevant features. Then, whenever you want to pick up the latest build, click Update.
Thanks Jeff for the amount of love you’ve put into PDE Target Platforms so far!
This sounds great! I really hate re-adding all the features over and over to get the latest software into by Target Platform. Any chance to have capability to set-up the automatic update of the Target Platform? Another feature I would find really useful is being able to have separate Target Platform for each Working Set in a workspace.
Radek,
Autoupdating is something that we have talked about and it is at least partially implemented. We’ll have to see if it gets into 3.7. Separate targets is something that has been talked about for a long time but is technically challenging. That would be a considerable amount of work and no one is setup to do that right now.
It’s nice to see improvements coming to the Target Platform thing.
At our company we found the whole idea of using P2 as Target Platform very powerful, especially when we have switched to Tycho for command line builds. Allows you to have a great control over the dependencies without the need to manually synchronize dependencies via VCS.