Tuesday, March 27, 2012

A Gentle Introduction to p2

A presentation by Ian Bull, committer on the p2 project, on why it was needed and some of its artifacts in a product.
  • Old style unzipping to plugins folder
    • No dependency resolution
    • Not provisioning
    • Some black magic
  • p2 manages install, has transactional capabilities and resolver
  • SimpleConfigurator 
    • reads bundles.info
    • installs and sets start level of bundles
    • do not edit!
  • Config.ini 
    • used by OSGi
    • it can be edited but is shared resource
  • p2 folder
    • cache
    • profile registry, aka agent
  • Multiple profiles allows one bundle-pool to manage multiple eclipse installs - bundle-pooling
  • Each profile has one state plus historical states, one of which it can revert to.
  • Current install is most recent profile folder in p2 folder
  • Should use director application to affect a profile install
  • Eclipse installer application exists but rarely used
  • Can't yet read OBR repos.
  • It isn't p2 that provides the poor message for package-uses conflicts but rather the OSGi resolver.

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