release p2 more often?

[laeubi]

I found the recent discussions at tycho/ oomph and sharing/contribution code changes often has one hindering, that it is too inflexible because both projects don't want to wait for the next release.

What I'm wondering is: As far as I know there is nothing forcing p2 not leasing more often, so why not release every month/ week / day or even on every commit or on demand?

What would be required for this would be an automatic deployment workflow e.g we can deploy to eclipse-maven (as we deploy snapshots) automatically and deploy to maven-central the sim-rel.

Maybe p2 would even be the perfect 'reactor' to get experience with an automatic maven deployment (in contrast to the sim-rel based one) and a more flexible deployment workflow?

[mickaelistria]

even on every commit

That's what I-Builds are about.

[merks]

Indeed, Oomph uses integration builds....

[laeubi]

even on every commit

That's what I-Builds are about.

I don't think that I builds are suitable here:

1. I-Builds are moving targets, they vanish once in a while and are therefore lost after a short while
2. They don't offer maven-artifacts
3. I once asked for using the I-Build but @akurtakov has explained some issues why we can't use them (probably because of 1.) as then Tycho can't perform release

[merks]

Keep in mind too that p2 depends on other things. During the development cycle it might well be modified to depend on things that are specific and new in its dependencies. So if p2 were to release, it wouldn't necessarily work with the released versions of its dependencies. This type of problem is of course why we have SimRel in general and why often downstream projects don't wont to depend on new things because then they can't be installed anywhere expect the latest release...

[laeubi]

Keep in mind too that p2 depends on other things. During the development cycle it might well be modified to depend on things that are specific and new in its dependencies.

Then one goal might be to release that dependencies also more often :-)

In fact we don't need to promote these "mid-releases" in a way that they become available in regular eclipse products, but for tycho or eclipse-installer, who cares what version/release they use internally to perform their work as long as I can press "the download button" and it works?

[merks]

By p2's dependencies we're specifically talking the Eclipse UI, all of its dependencies, including the rest of Equinox. So we're talking about most of what we currently release 4 times per year. That seems infeasible...

[laeubi]

Of course we can concentrate either of two things:

1. Find as much things why it can't happen
2. Try it out and see if it can happen

I just checked the git history up to the beginning of the year, most of the changes are version bumps (due to releases) or internal work, don't see any required UI/equinox changes that would have required a never version ... So of course it is possible, but a great part of effort is put into backward-compat things so it won't be required to update dependencies that often. On the other hand, there are often smaller issues inside P2 and its always annoying to wait for the next release until they are bubbling up-stream (especially tycho).

So one "rule" might be that never release never uses unreleased features of its dependencies, and if we need to depend on never versions once in a while we can't release more often, but in all other cases are evolving faster...

[vogella]

@laeubi what do want as additional releases? Just a stable update site? I think it would be fine to create these on request even though I'm not sure what the process is. Or do you need more than just a stable update site? Would you use work against a "latest" update site? URL would be able but content might change.

[laeubi]

m2e for example provides release (update-sites) also between sim-rel releases and additional a 'latest' so one has the choice what suits best. Beside that, as tycho tries to consume more and more through maven (as we get automatic updates through dependabot) also an automatic maven deployment (at least to eclipse-maven as tycho does) would be a goal.

[vogella]

I think we already have a latest, try https://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/latest IIRC @sravanlakkimsetti create this a while ago.

[vogella]

A big plus for an automatic upload to a Maven repo of our artifacts but I assume that would be a general issue for all platform components.

[laeubi]

We can leave of course tickets open even if we do not plan to work on them but I do not see value in this.

The value is that I or someone else might start work in that direction in the future and if someone complains we can reference this ticket and get more attention on the topic.