How to Install one Plug-in into Eclipse

How to Install One New Plug-in

• Old Way(before Eclipse 3.4)
  –Installed new plug-ins by dumping them in the eclipse/plugins/ directory and restarting with the -clean command line argument.
  –Put new plug-ins under one external directory, then create one link file under eclipse/links/.

• New Way
  –Use Equinox/p2/(http://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox/p2/Getting_Started)

Issue about Plug-in Installation - old way

• ~/.eclipse folder

–It doesn’t cache code there, but it does store other information. In eclipse/configuration: Certain files that were requested “extracted” from their plugins, like files or directories. The extension registry cache (that’s what -clean causes to be re-read, and is not a problem when updated via p2 as p2 cleans the cache). bundles.info, which is a pointer to specific plugins and their run levels. Other configuration level (as opposed to workspace level) information (things like network proxies, for example).
–There’s also the eclipse/p2 directory at the install level, which contains pointers to bundles and other install/configuration type metadata that is generated for a particular install.
–Refer to following issues:

https://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php/t/199193/

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/eclipse-sig@lists.fedoraproject.org/thread/74TAGFTYI42AYYKTOYH2AX6AEO5P2IYX/

So in our project, once we upgrade our tape, we need to delete the ~/.eclipse file in the meanwhile before starting SMT.

If not, the bundles.info will not up to date.

How Do We Do Now

• Use Equinox/p2

–The Eclipse platform ships with a default watched directory called dropins. The dropins folder is configured to be scanned during startup, and for changes to be immediately applied to the running system. Thus the dropins folder can be used much like the plugins directory was used in the past.
–See the detail in http://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox/p2/Getting_Started

• Notes

–By using p2, once we publish our plug-ins and features, any changes to the code must cause version increments. After changing one line of the code, it starts to differ from what people have installed on their machines, which means it is not the same version.

So we need to update the features and plug-ins bundle version

Please refer to http://wiki.eclipse.org/Version_Numbering

http://help.eclipse.org/kepler/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.pde.doc.user%2Ftasks%2Fpde_version_qualifiers.htm

How to Debug p2

• Add following content into
• /eclipse/eclipseRE/configuration/config.ini file:

–osgi.debug=/home/devin/p2_debug.option

• The content in p2_debug.option like below:

–org.eclipse.equinox.p2.core/debug=true
–org.eclipse.equinox.p2.core/reconciler=true