What Does Bushel Aim To Do?

[Mark Melvin]

Hi there,

I am new to Ivy but very experienced with Eclipse. I am trying to get
a build system up and running without using PDE build, and I came
across this utility. I was under the impression that Bushel would
generate an ivy.xml for you based on your MANIFEST.MF file - which
already contains all of your module information and dependencies. But
when I try to use Bushel it doesn't appear to do this. The example
has an ivy.xml file included that declares dependencies on top of the
manifest.mf file in the bundle. I guess my question is - what is it
that Bushel is trying to do for you? If you still need to duplicate
all of your dependency declarations in an ivy.xml file - why use
Bushel at all? The only other thing I can see it trying to accomplish
is avoiding copying jar files all over the place and using them in-
place from an existing eclipse installation. Am I missing something?

Thanks,
Mark.

[alexr]

On Sep 8, 8:58 pm, Mark Melvin <mark.mel...@gmail.com> wrote:
> manifest.mf file in the bundle. I guess my question is - what is it
> that Bushel is trying to do for you? If you still need to duplicate
> all of your dependency declarations in an ivy.xml file - why use
> Bushel at all? The only other thing I can see it trying to accomplish
> is avoiding copying jar files all over the place and using them in-
> place from an existing eclipse installation. Am I missing something?
>
> Thanks,
> Mark.

Hi Mark,

You are right, there is a bit of duplication of effort in the current
release. It would be fair to say, that Bushel is still not
functionally complete. If you have a look at the project Issues page,
you'll see some of the up coming features that should make it more
useful.

There are two ways you'll be able use Bushel to manage your
dependecies:

Firstly, you can define your dependencies in an ivy.xml file, and the
use something like BND (http://www.aqute.biz/Code/Bnd) in combination
with <ivy:cachepath/> to generate your MANIFEST.MF. Should be support
by the current release.

The second method, where your bundle MANIFEST.MF is the source of your
dependencies will be supported in the next version. To do this, Bushel
needed to properly handle Import-Package/Export-Package headers. This
work is currenty only available in SVN , I'll commit some final
changes very soon and then you'll be able to grab the latest artifacts
from the Hudson build to give it a try. I'd be happy to work through
whatever problems you have.

Cheers,
Alex

[Mark Melvin]

Thanks for the reply, Alex. I'm just getting started with Ivy so it
helps to know this sort of thing. I'll be playing with it more as I
go along.

Mark.