There is a long standing disconnect between PDE Target Platforms and the input you give to PDE Build. With target platforms you can define directories, installs and Software Sites (p2 repositories) as places to get pre-built bundles to use during development. That support has long been baked into the PDE UI code making it hard for the headless PDE Build infrastructure to use the same target definition when it compiles bundles.
In 3.6 (Helios) we partially addressed this by introducing the ability to “Export” your target definition. Users could get a snapshot copy of their active target definition content copied to a defined location. That location could then be used as input to PDE Build. With Eclipse 3.7M4 we’ve improved the export support in two major ways (and one minor fix).
- If the target definition uses Software Sites then the exported content coming from those sites has p2 metadata and artifact repositories associated with it. These repos can be directly consumed by PDE Build thus preserving the original published metadata and all the little extra configuration information that comes from the originator as well as supporting binary and feature root file content.
- You can now export any target platform, not just the currently active one. This considerably simplifies the workflow as you don’t have to switch targets and recompile your workspace (twice).
- I also slipped in a fix to a bug where deselected content was being exported even though it was deselected. Now the exported target content is a faithful copy of the original.
Like the other PDE changes I’ve been working on, these are just little steps down a longer path of making the end to end PDE and p2 workflows better integrated. The next step for this function is to make the exporting available directly to PDE Build via an Ant task so that it can get/update its target definition at the beginning of each build. That should be reasonably easy but there are sure to be details. Look for more on that later and in the mean time, enjoy these new more complete and higher fidelity target exports.