PDEBuild/Individual Source Bundles

Starting in Eclipse 3.4, source can now be shipped as individual bundles instead of the old way of one bundle containing the source for multiple plug-ins. This allows us to be more flexible around how source is delivered, and has the happy side effect of reducing the path length problems sometimes encountered when using Feature Qualifier Suffixes.

This page outlines the steps necessary to generate individual source bundles when building your project. See the help page for a review of the old way of generating source.

individualSourceBundles

In your build configuration's build.properties file, set the property

individualSourceBundles=true

This tells pde.build that you want to generate the new-style source bundles. If you are lucky, this is all that is required. However, generally, things are never that easy.

generate.feature

In a feature's build.properties file, the generate.feature property tells pde.build to generate a source feature.

generate.feature@<source feature id> = <feature id> [, feature@<feature id>] [, plugin@<plugin id>[;version=<pluginVersion>][;unpack="false"]]

When generating individual source bundles, this property remains as before, the difference will be noticed in the resulting source feature. Before, the source feature would have included 1 source plugin + a source fragment for each platform being built. In the new way, the source feature will include a source bundle for each plug-in/fragment listed in the original feature.

Plug-ins that were included in the source feature via the plugin@ syntax will not get corresponding source bundles. This is useful for adding doc plug-ins to the source feature.

Some plug-ins that were included in the originating feature (ie doc plugins) may not have source and should be excluded from the generated source feature. This can be accomplished with the addition of exclude@<plugin id> arguments to the generate.feature property.

Example:

generate.feature@org.eclipse.jdt.source=org.eclipse.jdt, plugin@org.eclipse.jdt.doc.isv;unpack="false",exclude@org.eclipse.jdt.doc.user