[jbosside-dev] Re: About feature.xml and bundling plugins (WAS: jBPM Designer feature.xml needs to be updated)

> > There are two very different things: > > One is what goes into feature.xml that states what your > feature actually > *need* and then there is your distribution. > ... > The other is distribution which is your feature + what is a > good default packaging. > > Of course we want the last ... In fact this is not true. Eclipse features *are* a packaging mechanism. A feature does not *need* anything by itself. Only the plugins in the feature have dependencies on other plugins. See : http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/*checkout*/platform-core-home/d ocuments/plugin-versioning.html?rev=1.2 for a document stating this. The fact that you will not find any Eclipse project that references plugins in the feature.xml is due to the fact that they are at the source and perfectly capable of defining their own packaging units in which no feature contains plugins that appear also somewhere else in other features. As a matter of fact after exploring the different Eclipse projects a bit I have found evidence that what you say is not true. Have a look at the attached feature.xml files for the rcp feature and for the equinox feature and see that they are exactly using the 'evil' way of doing things. And I am sure that if I look a bit around I will be able to find plugin providers (that are not part of the Eclipse overall project) that have also feature.xml files containing references to third party plugins in the <plugin> tags. > This thing we are doing here (with using <plugin> instead of > <import>) is actually in the same ballpark since it breaks > updatemanagers and depedency checking. Again, I have completely no evidence that this is happening. In fact, the JIRA issue you mention is happening because the update manager is looking for particular versions of the plugins stated in the feature.xml. But you don't have to state these versions in your feature.xml explicitly. If you do not state them explicitly any version that is available on the update site will satisfy the requirements. Regards, Koen