Equinox/p2/Location selection scenarios

This page tries to collect scenarios and use cases for controlling the various locations used by p2. This includes managing the location initial location of a profile, p2's data area, shared locations, the location into which additional function is installed and the relationship to the bundle pool etc.

Each details a scenario and is followed by one or more approaches. In some cases the scenario is not currently supported and a bug report may be listed.

Install

Select Bundle Pool on Install

<Note: This needs to be recast as a scenario. Why would they be unhappy? What are they expecting when setting this location?>

It should be possible to select the target bundle pool when installing plug-ins in Eclipse. The functionality can be compared to selecting an extension location when installing plug-ins prior to Equinox p2.

It is mainly motivated by user control to help driving user satisfaction. If you take control away from a user, it will make him/her unhappy. Therefore, a user should be able to keep control over the layout/organization of software on his computer. Additionally, the concept of extension locations has been well adopted within Eclipse. For example, PDE allows to compose plug-ins in wizards, dialogs and editors by grouping plug-ins based on their install locations.

Mac OS X layout

The current Eclipse.app is pretty badly laid out for Mac OS X systems, as is the location of the bundles. Macs have several hierarchies of places where things can be expected to be placed/read from:

• /Network/Library/Equinox/Bundles - shared across multiple computers, probably read-only
• /Library/Equinox/Bundles - shared across multiple users on the current computer, probably read-only
• ~/Library/Equinox/Bundles - accessible by the current user, probably read-write

Although it should be possible to define these as 'dropins', there doesn't seem to be any easy/obvious way to have multiple such directories.

There's a bunc of secondary issues for the Mac bundle, such as that everything it needs should be inside the Eclipse.app rather than dropped outside it; and logs shouldn't be written inside, but rather outside in ~/Library/Logs. P2 is somewhat inflexible and assumes a wrietable location for the application isnatll folder when extracting e.g. configuration.ini. Even if that directory is writable (e.g. running with admin priviledges) it should defer to some per-user location instead. (The common argument - that we want to install multiple different versions of Eclipse - is almost completely unnecessary when running as a 'normal' user, but rather something that Eclipse developers might do more frequently.)