Callisto to push the limits of Update Manager

David Williams is spearheading an effort backed by the Eclipse Foundation's Architecture Council to improve coordination of Eclipse's update sites. In particular, the focus is on the projects that will make up the Callisto simultaneous release planned for in June. In his ambitious proposal, David writes:

"We should be explicit, there [are] no plans to provide a big-huge-zip that contains all the Callisto projects … its expected to be provided entirely via update manager. "

There are 3 primary use cases being considered:

1. End-users will install a minimum "platform" program and from that be able to use Update Manager to install all of the Callisto release.
2. Committers and developers will install an "SDK" version of Callisto, to be used while developing their own plugins.
3. Adopters can provide their own update sites, and "point to" appropriate sites to pick up prerequisite features.

Some other notable details:

• JARs from various projects will be pulled in using mirrors with automatic GeoIP detection to find the best mirror.
• Mirror sites will be given at least 24 hours of exclusive access to the Callisto files before releasing them to the public.
• A Foundation-hosted separate mirror site with additional bandwidth will be used to accomodate the expected flood of downloads immediately after the release.

This is just a proposal but if it can be pulled off it will greatly improve the user experience of downloading Eclipse (not just the Platform but also parts like Web Tools and C Development Tools). Initial testing will start this month (February) with the goal that "by the end of the M5 period (3/3), there will be a usable version of Callisto available via update manager". This will be demoed at EclipseCon 2006.

Read the full proposal here.