Building p2 RCP products in Eclipse 3.5M6

We can also call this "Building for the Cloud" just to take advantage of the newest buzz word.

Susan Franklin McCourt put together a nice wiki page covering how to add p2 self-updating support to your RCP application. One of those examples was called "Updating from the Cloud".

As part of preparing for EclipseCon, I put together a simple releng product build that builds this cloud product for p2. The cloud bundle "org.eclipse.equinox.p2.examples.rcp.cloud" is available in CVS together with a releng project that I created.

[Edit 2013/07/03: Eclipse CVS has migrated to git starting in 2010.  The examples are now available under the examples folder in http://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/pde/eclipse.pde.build.git. The example has not been updated to work with git and has an obsolete CVS entry in the .map file.]

To run this example, check both projects out into your workspace, and read the rcp.cloud.releng/readme.txt.

Builder Setup

The releng project serves at the builder for a headless build. The build.properties file is a copy of the template provided by PDE/Build with some things we don't need removed. We modified the following properties:

• product : This defines the .product file which specifies how to create the cloud product. The first segment of this path is the plug-in id for the cloud project that contains the file.
• configs : Here we define the platforms we are building for. This is currently set to build windows, other platforms can be added. (The default here is *,*,* which is platform independent pieces, which doesn't make sense for a product).
• J2SE-1.5 : The cloud project has a Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment of 1.5. We set this property to be the bootclasspath to use for compiling 1.5. See the eclipse help for more details on these properties. We also set CDC-1.1/Foundation-1.1 because we had the org.eclipse.osgi bundle in our workspace (and so were compiling it for the product) and osgi requires that EE defined in order to compile properly.
• p2.gathering : We set this to true to use the new support for publishing metadata directly from source. This will also automatically install the product using the p2 director. More details on this below.
• p2.metadata.repo, p2.artifact.repo : In addition to the installed product, we also want a p2 repository.

We also provide a simple ant script named "buildProduct.xml". This is a very simple script that does the following:

1. Set the baseLocation. This is the location of your target binaries against which you want to compile. In the script we set it to ${eclipse.home} which is a property that is automatically set to be the eclipse that is running the build.
2. Find the delta pack. The delta pack is required for headless product builds because it contains all the platform specific fragments, and org.eclipse.equinox.executable feature which contains launchers for all the platforms. Download the 3.5M6 deltapack from here. The deltapack location will be added to the pluginPath property.
3. builder : the location of the build configuration files (ie: build.properties). We set it to be the directory containing the buildProduct.xml script.
4. buildDirectory: the directory where everything happens, set it to a subfolder of our builder.
5. pluginPath: the location to find more plugins and features. Here we add the workspace (one level up from the builder), and the deltapack.
6. Run the build. The property ${eclipse.pdebuild.scripts} is automatically set to the location of the PDE/Build scripts directory. Here we call the product build.
7. Victory! : copy the resulting archive into the root of the releng product.

The results of this build is a fully provisioned, p2 enabled product with an accompanying repository.

p2.gathering

In 3.4, p2 metadata was generated by running the metadata generator on the binary jars that were the result of the build. At the end of the build you were left with a repository and you need to perform a director install for get a fully p2-enabled product.

In 3.5 we have this new property p2.gathering. Setting this to true does a couple of things:

• Generate metadata from source. PDE/Build extends the p2 publisher to publish metadata and artifacts directly from source (and the compiled .class files) into a repository. There are no intermediate steps. (This also has the side effect of increased performance).
• Feature Builds result in a repository that is a group of all the platforms that were built. (This is an implicit groupConfigurations=true).
• Product Builds result in a fully installed p2 enabled product. This removes the need for a manual director call after the build is complete. The product build can also create a repository containing the IUs required to install the product.

The 3.4 properties still work for doing the old style generation.