Migrate to a new marketplace entry

@protoism and I have been trying to contact @branflake2267 for months to update the marketplace entry, so that new versions of the plugin can be published, unfortunately he hasn’t been available. One of the few things he was able to tell us was that he no longer had access to the http://storage.googleapis.com/gwt-eclipse-plugin/ storage, but did not follow up with us to change that storage link in the marketplace entry, or otherwise transfer control.

Without being able to update the existing entry to point to new hosting or gain access to the hosting, we seem to be left only with creating a new host and managing that going forward, updating the plugin to fix compatibility with recent versions of GWT and Eclipse itself.

We would not like to do this, as it will make it harder for existing users to discover the new plugin and know that they can update, and we would be unable to mark the old plugin as explicitly deprecated. If during the process of making a new marketplace entry we happen to gain access to the old one, we will have the choice of picking which one should be canonical going forwards, and which should be marked as deprecated.

Some suggested steps to move forward, ranging from “we don’t know a lot about managing a marketplace entry” to “how can we ensure there is a path going forward to keep this up to date”:

• Learn if there is a way to make a shared account on marketplace.eclipse.org such that multiple maintainers may control it.
• Understand the eclipse deployment format, ensure that simply unpacking the repo zip files to some server would be sufficient both for new releases and to keep existing ones (since it appears that artifacts.xml.xz and content.xml.zx are replaced each release, according to the current upload scripts). In other words, does building an existing gwt plugin edition for a new eclipse mean re-releasing old versions as well?
• We propose hosting at https://eclipse.gwtproject.org/ as the new content site, and probably incrementing the version to v4 to be unambiguous that this is a new version, and replaces v3 going forwards. As an alternative we could use github.io hosting, but that might not work well with huge binary files.
• Drop GWT SDK for 2.7 (and GWT 2.8.2?), add GWT 2.9, 2.10
• Add additional maintainers to the project, I would propose other currently interested members such as @foal and @slavap.
• Given the above, we’ll create GitHub Actions or some other CI to build each commit/pr, and upload release zips automatically. We can test those, and deploy tagged releases to the eventual host.

[keinhaar]

yes, i think that’s where we are. @foal has a working maven build. but it currently only supports actual eclipse version. my goal is a version that works also with older versions. i’ve added a maven compatibility layer to achieve that. maybe we can integrate both? also, because i’m now the maintainer of sdbg, we could add a new version of sdbg. i’ve recently added edge support, and i’m working on firefox support too.

[keinhaar]

I’ve setup an Update Site where my version of the plugin is hosted here:

• http://keeitsi.com/software/eclipse-plugins/

It installs up to Eclipse-2022-09. Currently it does not include any new features, but i’m beginning to clean up some dependencies. First step was to remove the JAXB dependency from SDBG, which was only there, because of DatatypeConverter. Maybe someone will find this useful 😃