Eclipse plugin doesn't work on Macs

Question

I'm building a plugin in Eclipse 3.5 on Windows which is a text editor for a language that my group works with. I distributed it as a .jar and just had people place it in the dropins folder. The problem is it doesn't run on any of the Macs that my coworkers use, but it seems to work fine on PCs. When run on a Mac, the plugin is simply not detected by Eclipse. No errors are generated as far as I can tell, I've checked the log files and run Eclipse in debug mode with no results. I've also tried -clean with no success. It's as if the file's not even there.

I'm brand-new to Eclipse and Eclipse plugin development, so I did some googling and found out about the Delta Packs, so I installed the one for my version and retargeted my plugin. Even after that we get the same result on the Mac -> no result at all. Since I have to bug a coworker every time I want to try something I haven't checked the error logs after trying the Delta Pack'd version. There are no platform filters specified, and all versions of Eclipse are set to use Java 1.6. Any help figuring this out would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I had a similar issue recently with a plug-in developed under Java 6 on Windows. I had to change the execution environment of the plug-in (in the manifest file) and the project JRE to Java 5 to have it show up on my Mac.

Now my Mac only has Java 5. You are saying these Macs have Java 6. Still it is quite probable Eclipse itself is running on Java 5, as I believe only the Eclipse 3.5 64-bit version will run on Java 6 on the Mac, and even then probably not by default.

Answer 2

It could be execution environment as Fabian suggests. Also check that the plugin doesn't explicit specify an OS. I accidentally set that in a plugin once. Most of the time it's not needed unless there is a native library dependency.