Eclipse RCP: build product able to load all plugins in plugins directory

Question

I need to configure my eclipse product to load all features/plugins in features/plugins directory. Now my product loads just plugins that are listed in metadata, so if I export some plugin directly from eclipse tool as "deployable plugins" it's loaded in my product, but if I put a plugin jar directly in plugins directory It doesn't appear (the same if I work with features)

I simply make new product configurations, put the feature that contains my application plugin and then exporting product I have this problem.

My eclipse version is 3.6.1

I think the problem is in the launcher configuration but I don't know what I have to change

Answer 1

In theory, your exported RCP application should simply pick up any new features and plugins you add later. However, make sure you put the extra stuff in the dropins folder of your RCP, since this is the expected location for manually installed features since the introduction of p2.
If for some reason it still doesn't work, try launching Eclipse with the -clean command line argument.

According to The Eclipse runtime options page, the -clean argument has the following effect:

[...] any cached data used by the OSGi framework and eclipse runtime will be wiped clean. This will clean the caches used to store bundle dependency resolution and eclipse extension registry data. Using this option will force eclipse to reinitialize these caches.

In my experience this can resolve many mysterious cases, where newly added plugins are not loaded by Equinox.