#6 Packaging support

[Markus Barchfeld]

If you build an RCP application you often want to repackage existing binary plug-ins. For example, you might want to base your RCP application on the RCP feature and only a subset of the Platform feature. Therefore you can define such a reduced platform feature and add it to your product configuration. This kind of build is available via the product.xml build script.

This works fine for one product. But there are use cases where this approach is not sufficient. Either because you do not want to build a complete RCP application (e.g. you might want to create a WAR file for server side applications) or you have RCP applications which share features. In the latter case you would have to create two product configurations and then run two complete product builds which would do a lot of redundant steps and would unnecessarily increase the build time.

The better approach would be to build your features (i.e. the features consisting of your source plug-ins) first and then create your build artificats consisting of your features, original binary features and also redefined binary features (like the reduced platform feature) with the package.xml script provided from the PDE build.

Next to the package.xml script there are also property and map files necessary, the PDE build contains skeletons for these files.
Pluginbuilder could provide a wizard to create an initial packaging configuration from the skeletons and an editor to modify the packaging configuration.

Q: Will signed plug-ins still be validly signed after repackaging?