Tycho promises to merge the world of osgi/p2 with Maven apparently making it dead easy to build plugins.

The JBoss Tools and Developer Studio team moved to Tycho last year and with 350+ plugins we learned a lot about what Tycho can do and not do.

In this talk I will show the Good, bad and ugly experiences we had and discuss our recommendations on how to and how not use Tycho.

Tycho is a recent addtion to the Eclipse Technology project and is a next generation build system for Eclipse. Its primary goal is to make build automation simple, robust and provide complete parity between IDE and automated build environment. Projects currently at Eclipse using Tycho include the EGit, Tigerstripe and the Memory Analyzer. Outside of Eclipse there is a rapidly growing set of project using Tycho most notable being JBoss Tools, and the Scala IDE for Eclipse.

In this talk we'll discuss the challenges that build systems are facing, how Tycho addresses those challenges and provide comparison with the classic PDE build system. We'll also demonstrate how Tycho integrates with continuous build systems, such as Hudson to provide complete automation for building, testing and releasing Eclipse plugins and applications.

Until the recent restructuring, numerous committers and contributors evolved Mylyn's source code for over six years in a single CVS module relying on a monolithic command line driven PDE build understood by one committer, executable on a single machine. Step by step the project was modularized, the build was migrated to Tycho and sources were moved into Git. Hudson jobs now execute on each commit and reproducible releases can be triggered by anyone. This talk high lights decisions taken and discusses lessons learned. Attendees will get an overview of Mylyn's build system with a focus on knowledge that is attendees can apply to their own project.