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

[Koen Aers]

> 
> 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
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