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

Ok while investing some time in the issue of the bundling and the jBPM feature.xml, I have been figuring out how to use Marshall's ant task and uncovering which use cases are covered and which are not. While doing this, I could not understand the very reason anymore of why we are doing this (may be because I missed the meeting/discussion on this, or else because I am plain stupid of course). So I read the email thread once again and have the following thoughts about it. - The approach with Marshall's ant tasks (bundleDependencies and calculateFeatureDependencies) only works when building the feature headlessly. If you want to build the feature by using the Export->Deployable Features from the Eclipse IDE the approach will not work. - Neither the Eclipse IDE build (Export->Deployable Features) nor the Eclipse PDE build (with the myriad of customTargets.xml, mainTargets.xml, etc files) support apparently building a feature and bundling additional plugins where you don't specify the plugins that you want to have bundled between <plugin> tags in your feature.xml - Why exactly is it then that our 'old/current' way of bundling things is so 'wrong'? The only real valuable reason I see (for now) is Robs comment: 'I'm just happy manual updating will go away'. But then I lose the ability to build from the Eclipse IDE... Moreover, I always thought that the feature.xml *has* to specify all plugins that the feature bundles, there is nothing 'evil' about that as I understand it. Additionally, doing this process 'automagically' through an ant task can indeed solve a lot of manual work, but then the information has become implicit and hence undocumented. I may be way late with all my ramblings and thoughts, but I am not so sure anymore if this is the way to go. Can someone convince me with some real advantages? Regards, Koen