EDT:How to add new EDT plugins

To add a new EDT plugin, a committer should do the following.

1. Be sure the new plugin's MANIFEST.MF is correct.
   • There should be no warnings on the MANIFEST.MF file.
   • The ID must begin with org.eclipse.edt.
   • The Version must be of the form 0.8.0.qualifier (use the correct numbers for the release you're developing).
   • The Name must be %pluginName and the Provider must be %providerName.
   • The Execution Environment must be JavaSE-1.6.
2. Create a file called plugin.properties at the top level of your plugin. It must define two properties, pluginName and providerName.
   • The pluginName must begin with EDT and it must be a good name for the plugin.
   • The providerName must be Eclipse EGL Development Tools.
   • Edit your build.properties file, and check the box next to plugin.properties in the Binary Build section.
3. Specify your dependencies carefully.
   • Don't require an exact version of a plugin without a very good reason.
   • Be aware that the build may be done with an older version of Eclipse than you are using.  For example, EDT 0.7.0 is built on Eclipse 3.6.0, even though the latest version of Eclipse 3.6 is 3.6.2.  We do this so EDT will work on every Eclipse 3.6.x release.
   • If the build fails with a "Missing required plug-in" error on your plugin, it probably depends on a plugin from a feature that's not included in the build. The features we require are listed in the featureIDsToInstall property in org.eclipse.edt.releng/build.properties. To learn which feature includes a plugin, go into your eclipse/features directory, and search the feature.xml files in all of the subdirectories for the name of the plugin you require. [Would somebody like to write a plugin to do this?]
     
4. Plugin projects should not set their JDK Compliance.
5. There should be no warnings on the plugin's build.properties file.
6. Add the plugin project to our Git repository. Do Team > Share Project > Git and choose our repository. Click the Browse button next to the Path Within Repository field and select the appropriate directory under org.eclipse.edt. Press Finish.
7. Add the new plugin to the feature.xml of its feature.  The feature is a project which names a set of plugins.  Most of our plugins are in the feature org.eclipse.edt.feature.
   1. Edit the feature.xml file and go to the Plug-ins tab.  Click Add, enter the name of the new plugin, the click OK.
      
   2. Plugins are usually contained in jar files, but sometimes a plugin needs to be installed as a directory so our tooling can easily access its contents.  If the new plugin must be installed as a directory, check the box labelled "Unpack the plug-in archive after the installation".  Also, edit the build.properties file of the plugin to be unpacked, and be sure that the files you need are checked in the Binary Build panel on the left.
      
8. Make an entry in the map file (org.eclipse.edt.releng/maps/edt.map) for the new plugin.