Filtering artifacts of assembled repository

[Frettman]

I have a Tycho (5.0.2) build of some plug-ins with two <repositories> as target platform. repo1 is https://download.eclipse.org/releases/2025-09/ and repo2 is a collection of in-house plug-ins. As the plugins of this build are intended to be installed in a regular Eclipse installation, the generated repository should contain needed dependencies from repo2, but nothing from repo1.

The only I way I can see to achieve that is to manually list each and every plugin in the feature, including plugins I use directly, but also transitive dependencies. Especially the latter part feels like trial and error right now: Try to install from the repository, look what's missing, add that, build again, repeat.

I was investigating tycho-p2-repository:assemble-repository to see if there isn't an easier way to do that. Basically includeAllDependencies plus a filter to exclude everything from repo1. Either by referencing the repository directly, or even just by excluding every plugin that starts with org.eclipse.*, but no such luck.

Am I missing something? This really feels like there should be smarter way to do this.

[laeubi]

Am I missing something?

Likely yes because that how it is supposed to work as you described:

1. enable includeAllDependencies and addPomRepositoryReferences and/or addIUTargetRepositoryReferences
2. then use filterProvided
3. possibly use includeAllSources if you want to include source bundles.

I also started a task to improve the documentation to make this more clear here:

• Restructure P2 update site documentation with overview page and specialized sub-sections #5842

[Frettman]

Thank you, that put me on the right track. What was missing from your suggestion was <repositoryReferenceFilter>. Without it, it wouldn't include anything from either repo1 or repo2. So I had to add

<repositoryReferenceFilter>
  <exclude>${url-to-repo2}</exclude>
</repositoryReferenceFilter>

to actually not exclude the content of repo2. It would have been better if the filter also worked on the repository ID (even a .target file has that), but since I have the URL already in a property, I can just reuse it here.