Planning

== Planning ==

Each site should put a list of items they want to get done. Item should be as specific as possible, and they can be grouped into category with a brief preamble. Each item should bear a MH (Must Have), SH (Should have) and NH (Nice to Have) to rate the relative degree of importance of the items to the site.

=== BNL ===

Modularization - increase the modularization of the platform, and minimize dependencies across plug-ins (especially for the site specific functionality.

• (MH) Divide CSS Core from CSS Core Utils as previously discussed. Create a org.csstudio.core.feature (which contains mininum set of plugins, to be identified and discussed) and a org.csstudio.core.utils.feature (which contains all the plugins that are part of core). Release versions of CSS will refer to release versions of these features.
• (SH) Extract DAL from org.csstudio.platform
• (??) Extract ??? from org.csstudio.platform (Kunal, please review what other components need to be extracted)

Standardize on features - review features to make them as much as possible usable out of the box by a product developer and by a user with a generic Eclipse RCP platform.

• (SH) Create a single "Epics 3 support" feature that enables epics for all data providers (DAL, utility.pv, PVManager). The current support for the protocol must be included ad-hoc for every provider by including it in the product. There is no way that a user (non/developer) can select the applications and the protocol he needs from an update site. Given the multiple providers, that the user should not be aware of which ones each application uses, and the limitation of the eclipse plug-in system, we propose that the features install all plugins for all data providers, even if not installed. At runtime, the unused plugins would not be activated. Note that this does not preclude a product developer to avoid using these feature and referring directly to the plugins.

Use extension point to create menu contributions

• (SH) Investigate how to use them and whether it's necessary to change everything at the same (can we have a period where menu contributions are specified in the old and new way?)