tycho goals touching artifacts.xml / content.xml should sort <artifact> / <unit> tags by their attributes for better "diffing" and readability

[in-fke]

tycho goals touching artifacts.xml / content.xml should sort / tags by their attributes for better "diffing" and readability.

As far as I can tell, this would affect

• tycho-p2-repository:assemble-repository
• tycho-p2-repository:fix-artifacts-metadata, but maybe also
• tycho-p2-extras:publish-features-and-bundles

Such files would be much more readable, especially when "diffing"!
Currently (using 2.7.5) I have the effect that fix-artifacts-metadata would re-write the file "quite randomly" and manually reviewing diffs seem impossible.

Hopefully, I did not miss anything.

A backport to 2.x would be nice.

[laeubi]

This is more something related to P2 as this is used to actually generate these files:

https://github.com/eclipse-equinox/p2

but in general artifacts.xml / content.xml not really meant for being looked at by humans or diffed, so maybe you can explain the use case in more details why you feel you need to look / diff these files?

A backport to 2.x would be nice.

Regarding back-ports please see https://github.com/eclipse-tycho/tycho/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#backporting for details.

[in-fke]

Again, thank you for following up on this so quickly.

but in general artifacts.xml / content.xml not really meant for being looked at by humans or diffed, so maybe you can explain the use case in more details why you feel you need to look / diff these files?

This was motivated by the use case described in #3505 where artifacts.xml / content.xml are git-managed.

[laeubi]

I think this is possible but currently nothing that many people will need so if its crucial to your business you should either try to implements this as a PR in P2/Tycho or look at the support options here:
https://github.com/eclipse-tycho/tycho?tab=readme-ov-file#getting-support