COSMOS SDD Runtime P2 Review

The SDD Runtime team took a week to do a deep dive into the framework called [1]P2, which is part of the Equinox Project under eclipse.

Goals

The main goals of the investigation was to determine where in the process the p2 framework was, and to get an understanding of the overall architecture of the framework. High level discussions had pointed to the architecture following the same constructs that the SDD schema and profile is trying to solve, but using different terminology.

Background

The existence of the p2 framework is not new information to the COSMOS teams. In fact, there is documented information on the p2/SDD alignment work that defines the terminology of SDD and how it is represented in p2. To see these differences, see xxxx.

Approach

The approach the COSMOS Runtime team took was to divide and conquer. With several "Getting Started" guides on the Equinox Wiki, we each took a guide and attempted to get something built based on the information provided.

Getting Started for Developers

For the "Getting Started for Developers" guide, we started by following the provided documentation and were met with little success. Retrieving the code and building in an Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) environment was proving fatal as the p2 code was relying on libraries developed for the 3.4 (Ganamede). The latest stable build of 3.4 is the M5 build. Once 3.4M5 was downloaded, the code was reloaded and recompiled and we started moving into running the steps defined in the guide. The first step of running the Metadata Generator SDK was successful and repository and archive data was generated. We have no way of knowing if the data that is generated is the correct data so we proceeded to the next step.