Removing discovery service from GEMOC Studio ?

[dvojtise]

In the latest version of Eclipse (Modeling 2020-03) the amalgam project that offers the base classes of the discovery service isn't included anymore

the last version of amalgam is 3 years old (cf. https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/modeling.amalgam)

This raises the question of "should we try to maintain this in the Studio (and relying on unmaintained component) or simply remove it ?

Apparently, other package replace this service by a marketplace where we could try to expose tool by asking contributers to use some "GEMOC" tag.

Note: I need a rapid agreement about removing this because I'm upgrading the studio to Eclipse 2020-03

[ebousse]

Fair question. Another problem is that currently I believe that many things in the discovery are not usable with the latest studio (eg. xmof) while still presented as something that can be installed.

Is amalgam compatible at all with v2020-03?

[dvojtise]

Fair question. Another problem is that currently I believe that many things in the discovery are not usable with the latest studio (eg. xmof) while still presented as something that can be installed.

We tried to add some info in the title and disable (in grey) to indicate the compatible versions to address this, but this is clearly not satisfying as the update is not automatic
cf.

Is amalgam compatible at all with v2020-03?

the only update site I found with it is http://download.eclipse.org/releases/photon, apparently it works in 2020-03 but if we use it in the build there is a high risk to maintain old dependencies on other components instead of using the latest versions.
Additionally, using both http://download.eclipse.org/releases/photon and http://download.eclipse.org/releases/2020-03 will slow down the build and the plugin resolution process

I would really prefer to have only one update site for getting eclipse core components in the build.

[ebousse]

Apparently, other package replace this service by a marketplace where we could try to expose tool by asking contributers to use some "GEMOC" tag.

Do you know what is the feasibility of that? Is it hard to push things to the marketplace?

[dvojtise]

The market place is quite easy, you just have to create an entry with description and an URL pointing to an update site.

The only points are about management of:

• ownership, by default the entry is created by one of the developer, for collaborative work (update of the description, etc), the creator of the entry must ensure to also add other maintainers in the owner list of the entry. Apparently, in order to work the user need to have connected once (cf. picture, I wasn't able to find @ebousse or @combemale )
• list of free tags allowing to sort our GEMOC aware contribution, currently I used gemoc as the only free tag (cf. https://marketplace.eclipse.org/category/free-tagging/gemoc ) but we may want to recreate some categories (similar to those we have in the discovery catalog http://gemoc.org/discovery/gemoc_3.1.x/catalog) (GEMOC Language (with probably some info about the metaprog and target engine); GEMOC Coordination; GEMOC Engine Extensions; Alternative GEMOC based Engines)
  This is less obvious for external tools that we encourage to use (ex: Capella, UML.. ) because we have to ask them to add the gemoc keyword on their entry. Maybe, one possibility for that would be to provide a "GEMOC XXX integration" entry, for any XXX we want to highlight, (if possible with some added feature in order to make this less artificial)

[dvojtise]

I've created a first entry for the Studio itself (https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/gemoc-studio)

@combemale @ebousse can you connect at least once on the marketplace (its the same login as your eclipse account) and send me your id, so I can add you as additional maintainer ?

If this is ok for most of you, we'll try to create the entries for the demonstration languages and alternative engines too (at least for those we are maintainer/co maintainer and know that they work with the current GEMOC studio version)

[dvojtise]

link to the announce of removal of amalgam from simrel : https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=542991 and https://www.eclipse.org/lists/cross-project-issues-dev/msg16059.html that motivates the removal of this feature from the GEMOC studio

[dvojtise]

Up, on this issue:

I'd like to remove old dependencies that is a possible cause of the studio unstability.

without explicit complain, I'll proceed to the removal of the discovery system.