[news.eclipse.platform.rcp] Re: Customize rcp application

[Alex Blewitt <alex_blewitt@xxxxxxxxx>]

This sounds like a branching issue, more than a plugin management issue. I'd suggest that you use your favourite source code control system, and just fork the plugin for each customer.

Fragments are probably not the best way of doing it. They're designed to add additional classes/documentation in after the plugin has been built, and unless you design a highly abstract way of building your plugins in the first place, that is going to be difficult to retrofit.

You are probably better off designing some kind of XML rules-based spec that configures the views automatically upon startup. That way, when you ship to a different customer, you can just change the XML file to get a different behaviour.

This is somewhat similar to the idea of plugin extensions, but if you start getting many views the extension points mechanism may quickly become unmanageable.