P2 on felix

This page describes the overall status of the work in progress toward making p2 run on Apache Felix.

Goal of the effort

Make the headless subset of p2 run on felix. At this point the effort is focused on getting everything necessary to get p2.operations up and running.

Overview of the work

There are mainly two parts to this work:

• Cleanup p2 dependencies. Some of the p2 bundles rely on Equinox specific packages. These needs to be cleaned up. See the list of bundles below for more details
• Teach p2 to deal with Felix. The goal of frameworkadmin is to isolate p2 from the file layouts of various frameworks (e.g. config.ini for equinox). Framework specifics are handled in a separate bundle like the frameworkadmin.equinox that knows how to deal with equinox. In order to teach p2 how to deal with Felix a frameworkadmin.felix bundle should be written.

Contributing to the code

1. Get the most recent 3.7 build available (http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/)
2. Create a CVS repository location for ":pserver:anonymous@dev.eclipse.org:/cvsroot/rt". Hint: Select the quoted text, open the CVS Repositories view, and select Paste Connection or hit Ctrl+V to add the connection
3. Expand HEAD > org.eclipse.equinox > p2.
4. Checkout "org.eclipse.equinox.p2.releng".
5. Import the "felix-subset.psf" project set by right clicking on the file in the Package Explorer and clicking Import Project Set... in the releng project you just checked out.
6. Set the target platform to be the felix.target one. Open the felix.target file contained in org.eclipse.equinox.p2.releng bundle and hit the "set as target platform" link. This target platform only contains the minimal set of prereq and does not include felix nor equinox.
7. Loading Felix. Because p2 relies on the 1.6 version of some of the packages from the framework, you will need to get a dev version of felix. The easiest is to download the felix jar from https://repository.apache.org/content/repositories/snapshots/org/apache/felix/org.apache.felix.framework/3.3.0-SNAPSHOT/ and then add it to the target platform.

After that you should be "good to go".

Status of the bundles

org.eclipse.equinox.frameworkadmin

• Status: compile errors
• Work to be done: Make the dependency on pluginconversion optional and ensure that at runtime the code is not loaded. The compile errors are fine since at build time the environment provides the necessary packages.

frameworkadmin.equinox

• Status: expected compile errors - unclear if this bundle is required
• Work to be done: Make sure that at runtime the bundle will not touch all the packages that are declared as being optional.

frameworkadmin.felix

• Status: unknown. There is no compile errors, but this code has not been exercised in years.
• Work to be done: Make it work :)

artifact.repository

• Status: compile errors because the SignatureVerifier facility requires org.eclipse.osgi.signedcontent from equinox.
• Work to be done: three possibilities - The choice here will depend if signature verification is desired in a Felix environment.
  • Make the dependency on the signature verifier optional
  • Split the verifier code into a new bundle (would be odd since it is
  • See if the signedcontent package from equinox can be separated in its own bundle.

p2.core

• Status: ok

p2.director

• Status: ok

p2.engine

• Status: compile errors because of the CheckTrust phase that validates certificates
• Work to be done: two possibilities:
  • Make the dependency on the signature verifier optional and make sure that even when the CheckTrust phase is invoked nothing
  • See if the signedcontent package from equinox can be separated in its own bundle.

p2.garbagecollector

• Status: ok

p2.jarprocessor

• Status: expected errors. The errors are caused by the reference to the org.eclipse.ant.core extension point used to contribute ant tasks.

p2.metadata

• Status: ok

p2.metadata.repository

• Status: expected errors. The errors are caused by the reference to the org.eclipse.ant.core extension point used to contribute ant tasks.

p2.operations

• Status: ok

p2.ql

• Status: ok

p2.repository

• Status: ok

p2.touchpoint.eclipse

• Status: expected compile errors. The bundle has optional dependencies on the publisher.

p2.touchpoint.native

• Status: ok

p2.transport.ecf

• Status: ok

equinox.simpleconfiguator

• Status: expected compile errors because the bundle register console commands and depends on the resolver API that are both equinox specific.

equinox.simpleconfigurator.manipulator

• Status: ok

ECF

• Status: unknown
• Work to be done: verify that the subset of ECF we are interested works on felix. A cursory looks at the manifest seems to indicate that it is possible.

Sat4j

• Status: ok