[pde-build-dev] Imported packages and the JRE

[Thomas Hallgren <thomas@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,
When I generate the component dependency lists for the Buckminster 
CSPEC's I do this by first obtaining a 
org.eclipse.pde.core.plugin.IPluginBase from the target platform. I then 
use the getImports() to find its dependencies. That method returns both 
the plugins listed as required in the plugin manifest and plugins from 
the target platform that fulfills imported packages. It seems the latter 
is a bit over ambitious.

I'm trying to create a headless minimalistic feature installer. In 
essence, it's little more then the Eclipse core runtime and the 
functionality needed to interact with the update manager. I've managed 
to get it down to a size of 3MB and by cheating, I can even get it down 
to 2MB.

So, how does the above two paragraphs relate to each other? Well, my 
cheat is that although the dependency seems to exist, I remove the 
org.apache.xerces plugin from the generated product. AFAICS, the only 
package required from that plugin is the 'javax.xml.parsers' package and 
if I run Java 1.4 or above, that package is bundled in the JRE rt.jar. 
And sure enough, everything seems to work just fine without it.

My question is, why the PDE doesn't Eclipse understand that it doesn't 
need the org.apache.xerces plugin to fulfill that particular package 
requirement? I guess I'm lacking some information somewhere in my 
product or feature description but I'm at loss as to where I should 
enter it. Any help or advice on this is greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren