[xwiki-devs] Extension Manager plan for 3.2

Hi xwikiers, Here is a quick status of Extension Manager work in progress and what we (Jean-Vincent Drean and me) plan to do for 3.2. = XWiki Repository = 3.1 main target was XWiki Extension Repository and work on it will continue in 3.2 as well Conversion of extensions.xwiki.org as a XWiki Extension Repository slipped a bit but that will hopefully be fixed during 3.2. What makes it complex is that REST URLs are going to be changed during 3.2. I'm still not sure what's the best between use a 3.2 snapshot of XR rest service which wil not work with 3.1 or keep 3.1 which will not work with 3.2 = Virtual extensions = Currently we have an issue when trying to install old stuff depending on extensions for which the name changed like xwiki-core which is now xwiki-platform-oldcore so to take care of that 3.2 will introduce virtual extensions. The id is that an extension can comes will a list of id aliases which will be use as well as its own id to resolve dependency agains already installed extensions. For example org.xwiki.platforms :xwiki-platform-oldcore will declare com.xpn.xwiki.platform:xwiki-core in its virtual extension list so when an old plugin is installed using extension manager it does not try to actually install the version of com.xpn.xwiki.platform:xwiki-core declared by the plugin and make XWiki pretty much unusable. This will also allow to more easily suport several implementations for the same API, all theses implementations would declare the same virtual extension id. This is very similar to Debian virtual packages concept. See http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-6742. = Reporting improvement = A bridge producing events based on log as just been committed, the idea is to have a generic way for component to access application logs easily. This can be used later with activity stream or remote observation manager. For Extension Manager the plan is to use that in the job manager (former task manager) to gather detailed log produce by extension manipulation job like install or uninstall and queue it in the job status. On the same idea a progression system has just been committed in extension manager which update a progress offset during job execution using events. Job Manager and both related progress and log tools are currently "hidden" in extension manager but will be move as common tools when we are happy enough with it to make easier to report progress or long task in XWiki (Lucene indexing, report page rendering log in some tab, etc.). See http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-6781 = Non interactive 3 ways merge of XAR = Xar handler will support full 3 way merge of applications between previous xar, new xar and database. 3.2 will probably be fully non interactive as a first version but we plan to implement a question/answer system allowing to let user do live conflict resolution since there is always corner case where a generic automated system can't find any good solution. See http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-6650. = Stabilized API = Starting with 3.2 most Extension Manager APIs will not be broken without long deprecation phase when possible as any other public API in XWiki. BTW to make sure I'm not lying too much would be great to get as much review as possible on theses ;) = New UI = Last but not least we will start the real (as not just a demo of the framework features) Extension Manager UI in 3.2. The plan is to follow Ecaterina Valica's (awesome) proposal you can see on http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Improvements/ExtensionManager. To be more precise we should be able to do the following for 3.2: * general UI refactoring based on http://incubator.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Improvements/ExtensionManager to some extent * detailed progress and log of extensions manipulation thanks to new framework APIs * extension detailed informations * live table for search result See http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-6775 Thanks, -- Thomas and JV