Monday, January 7, 2013

far Orbit

I am not a biggest fan of Orbit project. I do, however, understand now, that it is needed due to the legal reasons, as it was stated in the comment to my blogpost nearly a year ago:

  • The 3rd party libs have been vetted for IP, 
  • they have been turned into OSGi bundles so they can be used
  • they are available from a p2 repo so they can be consumed by PDE builds

 The biggest fear I have is that Orbit version of projects is isolated. They get OSGi Manifests, sometimes version number that is different from what is in the original, and sometimes even different name.
All those things does not make adoption and updates easy. There is practically no way to build Eclipse with newer version of a particular library and use it for testing.
So here is my proposition - let's contribute OSGi manifests or even entire packaging back to their providers. They don't always know/care about OSGi, but they rarely object such changes.
This will make the process of new version adoption easier, because testing/3rd party products could use newer version of libraries which is not yet present in the Orbit without taking the effort to build it them themselves.
Of course, I'm not demanding everyone to do it right now, but please, give it a thought before submitting a new [version of] Orbit bundle.

We should be removing the border between Eclipse and the rest of world.

Happy bundling!

2 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Hi Eike,

      I'm Eclipse Fedora packager - we don't use Orbit at all, only the upstream versions of libraries and I know how difficult it may be to push some manifest changes.

      But it is essential for Eclipse and lib providers to have common Manifest.MF (my dream).

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