[news.eclipse.platform] Re: Source locations in target platform use abso

[Petra Kritzinger <petra.k@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ed

Thanks for the advice. It would be excellent if I could do it the way you
suggest, to only use plugins. Problem is, if I create a new plug-in
project or SWT project, those JARs (from the Eclipse/plugin directory) are
automatically added by Eclipse (with the paths hard-coded).

If I want to implement the plug-in and/or SWT jars via a plugin (eg. using
menu option File > new > "plugin from existing JAR archive"), I would have
to manually add all the correct plugins that eclipse know to automatically
add (and also make sure the order is correct, I think).

Are there existing plugins containing all the correct jars? I'm referring
to the jars in the "Plug-in Dependencies" or "Standard Widget Toolkit
(SWT)" entries in the build path that are automatically created by
Eclipse. (I hope I'm making the problem clear! :-)


Ed Merks wrote:

> Petra,
> 
> One way to avoid this is to use plugin projects exclusively, even if you
> ultimately don't need plugins because in that case there will be no direct
> references to any jars and the build results of a jarred plugin will work
> fine as just something you put on the classpath.  When developing plugins,
> you should NEVER modify the build path directly. You should only edit the
> MANIFEST.MF and add dependencies via the Dependencies tab.  Any external
> jars you have should be put into their own plugin(s) and then other
> plugins that need these libraries will get them via plugin dependencies.
> 
>