ORBIT is ready for prime time

Orbit is now ready for prime-time. However don't ask us to put in Orbit your favorite jar because Orbit is *not* a super general repository. As per the project charter you will only find in here the libraries that other eclipse projects need. In fact the creation of orbit stemmed from the problem experienced in Callisto where each projects had their own copy of common.logging and the like which created various problems.

So to summarize, if you are an eclipse project using third party libraries and you want to maintain your libraries in a central place, then Orbit is for you (platform, wtp, tptp and a few other projects already do that).

Now on some rectification from Alex post :
- "so no GPL or LGPL is allowed.": Of course, this is true of eclipse in general because of license compatibility issues.
- "and the bundles have a date qualifier (which then changes between the builds, even if the actual version of Xerces and the codebase remains the same)". Wrong. Orbit uses the same practice than the eclipse SDK when it comes to managing qualifiers. The qualifier is generated from the CVS tag and the output will not change from one build to another if the content of the project has not changed. For example, the javax.servlet bundle in orbit  S200703161546 , is the same than javax.servlet in orbit S200702082257.

Paving the road to a new update manager, the first block

I've finally sent the annoucement email mentionning the creation of the provisioning incubator. I'm disappointed that I could not sent it earlier to give people more time to see what is going on before eclipsecon, but the last minute hacking for our "cool stuffs in equinox" demo (wednesday morning 10am) lasted longer than I expected :-) Oh well....

Regrets aside, I'm really exited because this is a new start and I really hope that we will get some strong and valuable involvement/contribution from the community and also cross fertilization with EPP and Maya (hope to see some of those guys become committers on the provisioning since it will influence a lot what they are doing). In fact I personnaly believe it is the perfect opportunity since we are starting from scratch and all in the open. Ok it is not perfectly from scratch because I have already committed some code, but this is more a starting point for discussions and directions rather than being the final answer.

So now I'm off to finish my suitcase and other slides, and I hope to see you at the "provisioning, an update on update" bof wednesday night.