At the Eclipse Summit 2007, Jeff McAffer gave a presentation [link to slides not available yet] on what has been happening with Equinox. I missed the talk itself, but later on I had lunch with him, Naci Dai of WebTools and Jerry Preissler of Swordfish and we talked about the Eclipse Provisioning Project, aka p2
p2 is a framework which is all about configuring things and putting them somewhere. That's as generic as I can make the definition :) In the example on the website, p2 is being used to move bundles around. The SoaTools, Swordfish and WebTools projects already do this kind of thing, and we have a set of deployment frameworks which allow us to configure and deliver things (WAR files for example) to different places (server runtimes for example). That's why we are interested, especially since there are visible moves in the direction of OSGi based runtimes for hosting Services .
I'm just at the point where I need to drill into the information on the web. As per usual, I'm confused about how p2 and Buckminster appear to do exactly the same thing. And I want to see how p2 matches up with the SoaTools SOAS component. If we could do something around extending p2 (if appropriate) then we could reduce the STP workload a bit. I guess that WTP and Swordfish are thinking the same thing.
I feel a workshop coming on here :)
A tangential point: as far as I know, and I am open to correction here, the p2 project was brought into the Eclipse ecosystem as an effort to replace the aging Update Manager mechanisms. Certainly over the course of the last couple of years, many interesting behaviours of the UM have come to light, but it might have been a good idea to fix those in conjunction with starting a new development effort. As per usual, if you have patches, feel free to open a bugzilla :)
Another tangential point: there is a project proposal called Riena which will also be interested in the p2 capabilities. I don't yet understand what Riena is trying to do - all I know is that it is about 'smart clients', the committers are mostly tall, and that they all wear the same teeshirts. When I find out more I'll let you know. In the meantime visit the top-level page on wiki for p2 for details.