OraclePluginProcess

Contents 1 Plugins Owned by Oracle Employees 1.1 Motivation 1.2 Certified Update Center 1.3 Plugin Portal Update Center 1.3.1 Publishing a plugin hosted in the NetBeans hg repository (main or contrib) 1.3.2 Publishing a plugin hosted outside of the NetBeans hg repository

Plugins Owned by Oracle Employees

This page describes the recommended process for releasing/publishing plugins owned by Oracle employees, who may or may not be members of the NetBeans team.

Motivation

It is useful to track all NetBeans plugins contributed by Oracle, and have some process that assures reasonable quality of the plugins, their timely availability to the end users, and continuity across several NetBeans releases.

There are two choices for publishing Oracle-developed plugins: either the Certified Update Center, or the Plugin Portal (and potentially the Plugin Portal Update Center).

Certified Update Center

Suitable for plugins that are tested by QA, and which are critical for the user experience of using NetBeans with Oracle technologies and products. The source code of plugins on the Certified UC should be hosted in the main NetBeans repository. The list of plugins for the Certified UC is tracked here: NB71StableModulesUC

It is the responsibility of the Release Boss to define and track the list of plugins on the Certified UC. The steps to add/remove a plugin from the Certified UC are:

1. Negotiate this change with the Release Boss
2. Add the plugin to the stableuc build configuration in cluster.properties
3. Upload the plugin to the Plugin Portal, but do not request verification of this plugin
4. Release boss will add/remove the plugin to/from the wiki page.
5. Release engineering will take care of publishing the plugins at the time of the release (FCS, Beta, RC)

Plugin Portal Update Center

Plugin portal should list all NetBeans plugins, regardless of whether they are available on the UC and which one, and regardless of whether they are developed by an Oracle employee or not, and regardless of where the sources are hosted. There is an Update Center associated with the plugin portal, which hosts a subset of the plugins at the PP. Only plugins of decent quality are eligible for the Plugin Portal Update Center - any plugin submitted for the PP UC has to undergo a manual verification process.

The list of plugins on he Plugin Portal UC is tracked here: PluginPortalUC. Especially plugins developed by Oracle employees should be listed here, to make it easier to track their availability across multiple releases.

The process for publishing plugins to the PP UC differs between plugins hosted in the netbeans.org Mercurial repository (main or contrib) and plugins hosted elsewhere.

Publishing a plugin hosted in the NetBeans hg repository (main or contrib)

1. Add the plugin to the build job that builds plugins by editing nbbuild/cluster.config#nb.cluster.betauc in the release branch (should be disjoint with nb.cluster.stableuc and nb.cluster.experimental).
2. Download the build artefacts produced by this job
3. Submit these artefacts to the plugin portal
4. Request verification for this plugin
5. Add an entry to the wiki page

Publishing a plugin hosted outside of the NetBeans hg repository

1. Build the plugin (everyone is responsible for building and signing their plugin)
2. Submit the plugin to the plugin portal
3. Request verification for this plugin
4. Add an entry to the wiki page