Private Emails Hide the Details

Recently, I've been receiving a lot of emails directly to my IBM address regarding bugs, features, releng questions, or building Eclipse for platform XYZ from people in the community.  These people are new to Eclipse and therefore may be unaware of the proper channels to ask questions.  I like to gently remind people ask a question on the forums or open a bug. The internet is forever, and Eclipse is no exception.  If you open a bug, others with the same issue will be able to search and find a solution.  Private emails hide knowledge that's useful to the larger community. As committers, we're very detailed oriented people.

Today, I responded to the latest request as follows:

At eclipse,
We're open source,
Private emails,
hide the details,

Asking in the open
Allows others to see,
the issue described,
the remedy prescribed,
for posterity

Found a problem?
Want to request a feature?
Please, I will ask,
open a bug for the task
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs



I look forward to seeing their bug.

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Trim your builds with p2 repository tools

The Eclipse Project has the unusual distinction of consuming the most download space of any project at eclipse.org.   Therefore, I like bugs with a request to "get rid of stuff" versus "add more stuff".  Recently, I fixed a bug to remove the packed jars from our zipped repositories that are available for download.

For example, we provide RCP binary and RCP source zipped repositories on our download page. Last week, these zips included both packed (*.jar.pack.gz) and unpacked (*.jar) bundles.

We don't need to include both types of jars in these downloads because most people will install the bundles locally from the zip.   The packed jars are included by default because when I run the mirror tool against the full build repository to create the slice, it already includes the packed jars.  You can use the remove.iu tool to query the repository for a list of all bundles and remove the associated packed jars.

<p2.remove.iu>
        <repository location="file://${yourRepo}">
        <iu artifacts="(format=packed)" query="">
</iu>

The remove.iu tool will remove the packed bundles from the repository and update the artifacts.jar accordingly.

As I have written before, repository tools are very useful for creating subcomponents of existing respositories.

Remove IU

Slicing and Dicing the p2 way

Want to learn more about using p2 to assemble products out of pre-existing components? Plan on attending the From build to assembly to deployment: Using p2 to facilitate agile software development tutorial that Ian Bull and I will be presenting at EclipseCon.

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