Oh. My. God. It's over. Bug 106804, "rearrange the features to minimize external dependencies", is finally done. It's been quite the ride, as you can see in the bug. The last three days are a blur, but it's done. Marcelo and I have been fighting the good fight solidly from Tuesday until this morning to contain this change in time for the M7 + 1 deadline. Thanks to the PDE folks for providing invaluable assistance in deciding what paths to take. Pascal, Kim, Sonia, Andrew: you guys rock. Thanks also to everyone else I've bugged with 'have you ever done this with your features / does your project do this?' questions to determine if we were treading into impossible territory or following an existing path.
EMF now contains smaller features which can be installed via Update Manager to compose whatever legal combination you want. Thanks to Update Manager finally working with features' dependencies on plugins, you can use PDE to generate a feature's dependencies and have the Update Site actually work when you hit 'Select Required' to pick up all the associated required features and their contained plugins. (You have no idea how freakin' exciting this, and how long I've been waiting for this to work.) I still think features suck, but for now I'll allow that they suck a little less than last week.
So, here's the obligatory shout-out to the community to try out EMF 2.3.0M7, and let us know any issues you might have w/ migration & adoption. You can grab it from the usual places. Please don't hesitate to speak up in bug 106804: if there are any unforeseen migration pains, I'll use your comments to draft documentation explaining what's different, why, and how to roll with the changes next week after I've slept a little.
Thanks, everyone, and happy EMF'ing.
