p2, your savior or your achilles heel? Everything an Eclipse team needs to know about p2

Complementary to Discovering the p2 API's. More details on the rules of working with p2:

• do not touch the installed files on disk
• do not move or delete plugins
• do not extract into the plugins folder - a zip can be used as an install location to p2 for proper management
• do not use the dropins folder
• do not replace published content, i.e. publish a new jar under an already published version
• always use a qualifier
• use feature patches if new release not feasible
• do not remove released repositories - use retention policies instead (?)
• use categories - composite repositories can introduce a category layer
• use descriptive feature names and provide descriptions
• MetadataGenerator has been removed in Eclipse 3.7 - use Publisher instead