Create a feature out of a maven-target location

[laeubi]

There should be an option to create an autogenerated feature out of a maven target location that simply includes all (transitive) dependencies of that location.

That would help people to rapidly setup a maven dependency in case of feature based products. For finer grained control, user features can still be created/used.

[laeubi]

This is currently blocked by https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=576568

[HannesWell]

Do you plan to support 'pom' modules as well?

[laeubi]

Pom modules are already supported and will result in a gnerated feature from the maven information once PDE supports the dynamic generation of features (I'll propose a patch soon for this but we will need to wait until next release of PDE...).

[HannesWell]

Yes, I meant to create a feature out of a pom-module. That will be a useful feature!
I think m2e itself could use it to include the embedded jars in m2e.archtype.common and m2e.maven.indexer as bundles because those two bundles actually only serve as 'group' of jars, which would actually be simply a feature.

[laeubi]

My change is accepted and will hopefully be merged soon, I have created a local POC that converts a pom dependency to a feature

sadly PDE is not capable of displaying such a feature, so further changes are required to make this work more smoothly...

[laeubi]

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=576610 is also a requirement for this.

This then allows open the feature inside PDE:

[HannesWell]

That looks great! Really looking forward to this one.
I'm curious, how does one specify that and how the feature is created? Do I just have to flip a switch for a Maven-Target location and say create a feature for all bundles in this location? For example by specifying the feature-name as attribute of the target location? And will the feature then include all bundles of that target? Or will there be a dedicated "create-feature"-element in a Maven target where you can specify other data (like licence or URLs etc.) of the feature as well?

If you prefer, we can also discuss those things in a (draft) PR once your POC is successful and all PDE requirements are met.

[laeubi]

The feature is currently in an experimental stage and the first goal would be to have anything generated that could be used as a feature, but there is also some time to decide an all of this as we have to wait for the next PDE release in December anyways, so first GA will be the 2022-03 eclipse release.

I really would like to have Bug 576610 merged as it simplifies inspecting the feature generated but will create a draft PR with a first version then and if you like any Alpha-Testing would be appreciated.

My current plans are as follows:

• if we have a pom-dependency an automatic feature is generated with the name <groupid>.<artifactid>.pom and version of the pom (that's what shown at the screenshot), depending on the "include dependencies" flag of the location it will contain only direct or all transitive dependencies. currently I do not plan any further customization here as the user is free to ignore that feature if it does not fit
• for a location I'd like to have a <feature> child element that uses the syntax of the feature-file xml (so we can parse it using PDE) and it will then simply add all bundles in that location as additional plugins, so the user is free to define it in whatever way he wants, but this part is a bit vague at the moment as I have to think how this could be represented in the UI in an appealing manner (there is probably a chance to reuse the PDE editor for this, this will also require Bug 576610 as well).
• I also like to derive a description and license information from the dependent artifacts like description, license information and alike if not specified by the user.

This hopefully will allow people to define pom-as-a-feature that could easily be used in targets as an alternative to update-sites for smaller projects with just a few related artifacts and thanks to maven resolving dependent items as well will reduce task of define self-contained features.

[laeubi]

I now added basic UI to generate a feature for non-pom maven locations

If the option is checked the wizzard contains a new page to enter basic infos

If one likes he can add additional plugins as well that should be mentioned in the feature (but this step is optional)

Afterwards this will end up in the target source and one can add/edit/adjust additional data, effectivly everything the feature.xml supports is allowed here: