Where can I find information about the Eclipse Architecture Standard?

Question

I basically need the full description of the standard as well as any document that touches the subject
(its applicability, problems, quality attributes promoted and not promoted by the standard).

Any reference will help.

Answer 1

Perhaps Erich Gamma's book Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins is what you're looking for?

Answer 2

Notes on the Eclipse Plug-in Architecture ?

Answer 3

The Book - OSGi in Practice from Neil BARTLETT is also a good addition to the framework used by Eclipse: OSGi.
(So while it is not directly about the eclipse architecture, it is about one of its core element)

Extract from section 1.8.2:

As already noted, the Eclipse IDE and platform are based on an implementation of OSGi. However this was not always the case: prior to version 3.0, Eclipse used its own custom module system.

In Eclipse terminology, a module is a “plug-in”.
In fact, Eclipse developers often still use the term plug-in as an alternative name for an OSGi bundle.
In the old Eclipse system, a plug-in was a directory containing a file at the top level named plugin.xml. This file contained metadata that was broadly similar to the metadata in an OSGi manifest: the name of the plug-in, vendor, version, exported packages and required plug-ins.

Notice a key difference here.
In the Eclipse plug-in system, dependencies were not declared at the level of Java packages but of whole plug-ins. We would declare a dependency on a plug-in based on its ID, and this would give us access to all of the exported packages in that plug-in.