The Update Site projects
The Eclipse update site is
- a web site
- a categorized list of versioned features (each feature could have multiple versions)
- Jars for each feature and the plugins (with multiple versions)
- an optimized form of this for quick downloads
The update site support consists of 2 feature projects and one update site project. The 2 features are there because one feature is for users who might wish to integrate UIMA into an RCP - it consists of the "runtime" part of UIMA, without the Eclipse tooling plugins for UIMA. The other feature are the Eclipse tooling plugins for UIMA. The 2nd feature has the first one as a prerequisite, and also prereqs EMF.
The update site "build" is done by an ant script called by maven's ant-run plugin, but the script (called build.xml) can also be run directly (for testing).
Each time we go to a new version, we (currently) keep all things version-synchronized. The 3 projects have version information in them that is udpated.
The site, however, needs to keep the old versions that were previously put up as part of the update site, available. There are 3 kinds of information that are kept for older versions:
- the site.xml - holds references to previous versions
- the jars built for the features (these are very small, and are kept in the update site's
features
directory - the jars for the associated plugins, and are kept in the update site's
plugins
directory