Creating and sharing a complete GAMA developer environment

[AlexisDrogoul]

Is your request related to a problem? Please describe.
Installing GAMA in dev model (ie. in Eclipse, with Github repositories, etc. ) results in different configurations in terms of plugins, projects present in the workspace, preferences, target platforms, working sets, external tools (like JAutoDoc), etc.
This makes it difficult to understand what is dependent on GAMA and what is dependent on the environment of the developer when a problem arises.
The situation has considerably improved as, now, the Java & DSL version of Eclipse is sufficient (no necessity to install other plugins). But downloading GAMA is still a bit complicated (with model projects that should not be considered as "projects") and afterwards, very few people use the preferences (CleanUpForGama.xml, CodeFormatterForGama.xml, or PreferencesForGama.epf) and working sets (ProjectSetForGama.psf) present in ummisco.gama.product`), resulting in oddly formatted files.

Describe the improvement you'd like
I would like to be able to use an installer like oomph and feed it with a configuration file in order to :

• Install the correct version of Eclipse
• Create a new workspace
• Automatically fetch the GAMA plugins from GitHub and install them as projects in this new workspace
• Organise the plugins in project sets (UI, CORE, FEATURES, etc.)
• Install basic gui and headless run configurations, ready to be launched
• Create and install a correct target platform (see gama-platform/gama#3860).
• Loads the general preferences, as well as the ones for formatting and cleanup actions
• Installs interesting plugins and their preferences (JAutoDoc comes to mind).
• Make sure that the correct branch of GAMA is active in git

This would also ensure that the dev environment uses the exact set of versions of Eclipse, etc. as the ones proposed on https://github.com/gama-platform/gama/wiki/InstallingGitVersion

Describe alternatives you've considered
One alternative would be to manually configure and share ready-to-use Eclipse images, but I'm not so sure how to create them.

Additional context
A step by step tutorial on how to build something similar is documented here: https://www.vogella.com/tutorials/Oomph/article.html

Please comment or provide feedback on the interest of this and/or additional features or alternative ways to do it.

Thanks !