[ag-automation] Eclipse Deployment

[Robert Schwebel]

Hi, 

I know that some of this list's members use Eclipse in production
environments, so I would like to find out how you guys do your
deployment in a reproducable way. We more and more use Eclipse for
customer projects, but there are still some issues with regard to
controlled distribution.

What I would like to do is to prepare a distribution pack which contains
all necessary plugins, for example for C/C++ development and configure
it according to our needs. Trick: we need to remember what we did, in
order to be able to re-do exactly the same thing in half a year. So
making a tarball or distro image in the end is not the problem, but to
define the workflow for the prototype. 

The proposed workflow would be like this: 

- Install Eclipse SDK. This part is easy, just gunzip the tarball into
  some directory. Easy to be scripted. 

- Install "old style" plugins. Also easy, you just have to unzip the
  archives into the eclipse/ directory. Problem: there are no update
  sites configured for these plugins in "Software Updates -> Find and
  Install". But as there is no update site for these plugins anyway it
  probably isn't an issue.

- Install "new style" plugins which are being distributed with an update
  site. It is easy to mirror an update site with something like

  java \
        -cp startup.jar org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main \
        -application org.eclipse.update.core.standaloneUpdate \
        -command mirror \
        -from $URL \
        -to $MIRRORDIR \
        -consolelog\

  But unfortunately, the -install command doesn't install from a
  mirrored update site, given as a file URL. You can install from a
  http:// URL but not from file://. 

My current workaround is to have a bundle of scripts which involve a
locally started web server which does nothing but expose the archive
directory via http, to be able to install from http:// URLs. But that
looks simply plain uggly, so there must be a better way. 

Any ideas? 

Robert
-- 
 Dipl.-Ing. Robert Schwebel | http://www.pengutronix.de
 Pengutronix - Linux Solutions for Science and Industry
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