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I discussed this with Yarda when he was here (MPK) in September and he asked me to make a formal request for this feature. In Sun's native IDE product, we are using Yarda's cluster model from the "Installation Structure" document to control module selection. During Q&A, Yarda said it was unlikely there would be a cluster with debugercore but NOT JPDA. The native IDE very definately does not want JPDA in our product. Yarda and I discussed some mechanism such that we could pass a modules list during startup, of modules we want ignored. We don't just want a disabled module, we want it completely invisible and unable to be turned on from the native product. We don't have an immediate need for this as our first product release will be 3.5 based. But our followup releases will need this feature so I'd like to get it in the plans for promo-d or e (its unclear what promotion our next release will be using).
FYI: discussed in installation proposal: http://www.netbeans.org/source/browse/openide/www/proposals/arch/installation.html.diff?r1=1.63&r2=1.64 still not clear whether this is the right solution.
I would prefer to implement this simply be disabling autoscan of modules/{,eager/,autoload/}*.jar at startup. 1. (+) In a built IDE, you have <createmodulexml> to define the enabled modules already. 2. (+) Auto Update can create or modify system/Modules/*.xml files acc. to metadata added to Info/info.xml, solving some other problems as well. 3. (+) We can eliminate the eager/ and autoload/ subdirs, simplifying the build process. 4. (+) This RFE can be handled by just creating system/Modules/*.xml_hidden in the product dir to "brand out" the unwanted module. 5. (+) Simplification of org.netbeans.core.modules.ModuleList, and possibly improved startup performance (TBD). 6. (-) Minor inconvenience for power users who for whatever reason want to just drop a JAR in the modules/ dir and have it work. May need to change Modules -> Add Module... to automatically use a relative JAR URI and symbolic installation dir name in case the JAR is in fact in modules/*.jar.
Promo D seems most appropriate.
Due to issue #41433, you should now be able to simply put an (empty) file system/Modules/org-netbeans-modules-whatever.xml_hidden in your cluster directory in order to suppress an unwanted module from a base cluster. This would have worked before except for autoscanning.