Remove unused equinox.executable.feature resources

[HannesWell]

The build.xml is currently shipped with the o.e.equinox.executable.feature which is odd and it at least seems not to be used for the build of Equinox.
I wonder if this is used by Tycho or probably more likely by the PDE Build Ant targets?
@iloveeclipse can you tell that with certainty? I have found some hits in PDE that indicate that, but I'm not sure and as far as I understand that content I'm in doubt it is useful for anything?

More or less the same question I want to raise for to the o.e.equinox.executable.feature/resources/build.properties. It is also shipped with the feature but is content is partly outdated (linux.aarch64 is missing) and its content is inconsistent. Sometimes it uses launcher as name of the executable and sometimes ${launcherName} (which I assume is supposed to be interpolated?

equinox/features/org.eclipse.equinox.executable.feature/resources/build.properties

Lines 17 to 36 in 9fd42b0

	####Even though marked as custom, the content of the build.properties needs to be updated to ensure correctness of RCP app exported
	root.permissions.755=${launcherName}
	root.win32.win32.x86_64=file:bin/win32/win32/x86_64/launcher.exe
	root.win32.win32.x86_64.permissions.755=launcher.exe
	root.linux.gtk.ppc64le=bin/gtk/linux/ppc64le,gtk_root
	root.linux.gtk.ppc64le.permissions.755=launcher
	root.macosx.cocoa.x86_64=bin/cocoa/macosx/x86_64
	root.macosx.cocoa.x86_64.permissions.755=Contents/MacOS/${launcherName}
	root.macosx.cocoa.aarch64=bin/cocoa/macosx/aarch64
	root.macosx.cocoa.aarch64.permissions.755=Contents/MacOS/${launcherName}
	root.linux.gtk.x86_64=bin/gtk/linux/x86_64,gtk_root
	root.linux.gtk.x86_64.permissions.755=libcairo-swt.so
	root.linux.gtk.loongarch64=bin/gtk/linux/loongarch64,gtk_root
	root.linux.gtk.loongarch64.permissions.755=launcher

@akurtakov or @laeubi maybe you know something about this?

[github-actions]

Test Results

  660 files  ±0    660 suites  ±0   1h 11m 51s ⏱️ +40s
2 195 tests ±0  2 148 ✅ ±0   47 💤 ±0  0 ❌ ±0 
6 729 runs  ±0  6 586 ✅ ±0  143 💤 ±0  0 ❌ ±0 

Results for commit e94162d. ± Comparison against base commit 99a8578.

♻️ This comment has been updated with latest results.

[iloveeclipse]

I don't have any knowledge in this area. May be @sravanlakkimsetti knows more?

[merks]

This is needed to build products, at least with Tycho. It, e.g., https://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/4.32-I-builds/I20240410-1800/features/org.eclipse.equinox.executable_3.8.2500.v20240410-1706.jar, contains the launchers:

For Oomph we need to take special steps to ensure it's specified the target platform so that we can build the installer product:

When a product is built, you can see it in the target folder:

When I remove it from the target platform, the build fails like this:

[INFO] -------------------------[ eclipse-repository ]-------------------------
[INFO] Resolving dependencies of MavenProject: org.eclipse.oomph:org.eclipse.oomph.setup.installer.product:1.33.0-SNAPSHOT @ D:\Users\merks\oomph-1.33\git\oomph\products\org.eclipse.oomph.setup.installer.product\pom.xml
[INFO] {osgi.os=win32, osgi.ws=win32, org.eclipse.update.install.features=true, osgi.arch=x86_64, org.eclipse.update.install.sources=true}
[ERROR] Cannot resolve project dependencies:
[ERROR]   Software being installed: org.eclipse.oomph.setup.installer.product.with-jre 1.33.0.qualifier
[ERROR]   Missing requirement: org.eclipse.oomph.setup.installer.product.with-jre 1.33.0.qualifier requires 'org.eclipse.equinox.p2.iu; org.eclipse.equinox.executable.feature.group 0.0.0' but it could not be found
[ERROR] 
[ERROR] See https://wiki.eclipse.org/Tycho/Dependency_Resolution_Troubleshooting for help.

So products appears to have an implicit requirement on this feature.

[HannesWell]

So products appears to have an implicit requirement on this feature.

Yes, but this PR is not about removing the feature, it is only about to removing the build.xml (and build.properties) embedded in the built feature jar:

I have updated this PR to also remove the build.properties to show its 'full' state, given both are not required.
I would be surprised if Tycho relies on an ANT script delivered with this feature, but I'm not sure if the build.properties delivered with it is used somehow.
At the same time I would not be surprised if the PDE build ANT task rely on the shipped build.xml or build.properties in some way. For ordinary bundles and features the build.properties are not included in the built jar. But as Ed already elaborated, the equinox.executable feature is special so I will investigate Tycho and PDE build in detail unless somebody else can say with confident that any of those files is useful or not.

[sravanlakkimsetti]

I remember build.xml being used to package native launchers for equinox download page. See https://download.eclipse.org/equinox/drops/I20240411-1800/index.php(section Native Launchers).

If these zip files are created without build.xml we can get rid of build.xml.

[akurtakov]

I remember build.xml being used to package native launchers for equinox download page. See https://download.eclipse.org/equinox/drops/I20240411-1800/index.php(section Native Launchers).

If these zip files are created without build.xml we can get rid of build.xml.

I am surprised by the many N/A on that page

This makes me wonder whether anyone is ever looking at this page as we never got any report about this at all.

[laeubi]

I remember that the pde-build tests depend on these files, I already wondered about them a while back but gave up on this as keeping them is obviously not an issue but removing them will probably break some unknown consumers.