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Can Eclipse 3.5 discover all bundles in the plugins dir?

Answer 1

A:

Maybe this will help you (shot in the dark)? I found this when upgrading my Eclipse installation to Galileo and trying to keep my Flex Plugin install.

Ryan Lynch 2009-11-10 04:08:47

Thanks for that, but that's a different use case - it's useful for sharing plugin locations using links. I would not introduce such indirections in my product out of the box.

inger 2009-11-10 04:19:44

Yeah, I'm not an Eclipse developer but I thought I'd take a shot at it. Good luck.

Ryan Lynch 2009-11-11 00:22:20

Answer 2

+1 A:

Even if it does not fully answer what you are after, you can specify in an eclipse.ini (like the one I describe here):

-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.p2.reconciler.dropins.directory=C:/jv/eclipse/mydropins

That does specify to p2 to monitor any directory of your choosing to detect plugins in it.

Another source of idea could be this article: Composing and updating custom Eclipse distros

It's not hard to create a feature based product that includes these things, and do a product build to end up with something like this:

alt text

Note: the concept of reconciliation is detailed in the eclipse Wiki.

For certain installations of Eclipse, there will exist the notion of a shared installation -- this may be in the case of a Linux system where a base set of software is installed via packages (perhaps RPMs), or may be in a Maya deployment where shared profiles are defined in a central server.
In both cases, it is necessary to perform reconciliation between the shared profile and the user's current instantiation of the profile including any modifications they may have made.

Part of this mechanism is the Dropins Reconciler setting. Although, as bug 251561 illustrates, it is not advised to put too many plugins in there.

VonC 2009-11-10 06:55:57

Cheers for that. So basically, that's the way to implement 'watched directories' (2nd alternative in my Q). I saw this option mentioned on various blogs,but wasn't clear if it does the right thing. Can you add multiple dirs there? Can you add the plugin dirs itself?Is this documented at all? Nothing in the help system, nor on the p2 wiki (which seems to have hundreds of pages, but very little is up-to-date or concrete beyond raving about how cool the system is.. in principle:-) Anyway I'll try it - thanks a million for your hints.

inger 2009-11-10 17:51:57

Also, why using the -D vmarg, what not adding it into config.ini?According to the guideline, eclipse.ini is for general vm settings- everything else should go into configuration/config.ini. See the 'bottom line' http://help.eclipse.org/galileo/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/reference/misc/runtime-options.html

inger 2009-11-10 17:55:00

@inger: good point, but I have always modified one config file: the eclipse.ini. It is always distributed with eclipse, and I avoid having to modify several files.

VonC 2009-11-10 18:13:45

@Vonc, thanks for the extra additions to your reply, especially the link to that bug- which basically says _dropins are already deprecated_ (https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=251561#c18). Unbelievable..

inger 2009-11-11 23:59:58

@Vonc, also the link to that Andrew Niefer's blog is interesting, but isn't really relevant to the question, is it? Note that I don't care about updateability, at least not before I can just run my damn product (without rewriting my build system).

inger 2009-11-15 02:29:29

Answer 3

+1 A:

You can alter your configuration/config.ini file to not use the org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator (which does the p2-based configuration) and instead use the org.eclipse.update.configurator which is the old-school way of just configuring whatever is in the plugins directory. This should give you what you want.

Francis Upton 2009-11-26 04:01:04

I just came to the same conclusion - which seems to work finally. My earlier trials failed on this:I got spurious NCDFEs and mysterious crashes - which lead me to believe it's not possible to "go back to the old-school way".Now that I started over from scratch(probably clearing the actual root problem of some other missing bundles),things look much better:) Anyway, thank you for confirming this! I was about to add an answer for this..However, some eclipse bundles (e.g JDT) explicitly require the simpleconfigurator(which I find a bit strange).Do you think the old school way be OK with those?

inger 2009-11-26 11:24:56

I don't know what you mean by a bundle requiring the simpleconfigurator. As far as I know that's a function of the environment (as specified in the config.ini), not something that can be specified by a bundle. Can you elaborate on what you mean here?

Francis Upton 2009-11-27 09:55:28

Sure. There is bundle org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator_1.0.200.v20090831.jar and another one depends on it by Require-Bundle in the MANIFEST.MF: org.eclipse.jdt.junit_3.6.0.v20091026-1200.jar.

inger 2009-12-04 04:38:07

Oh, I understand now. That's fine because the JDT JUnit stuff must be referencing something from simpleconfigurator which is not a problem because the bundle will still be there, but that's completely independent of the process used to do the initial configuration.

Francis Upton 2009-12-04 07:07:35

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