Eclipse 3.5 - some PDE improvements

With Eclipse 3.5, some new interesting features appears to improve the publication of Eclipse products and features.

Now you can publish p2 metadata directly from the build instead of generating it later based on binary jars.
To do that, just put this property :
p2.gathering =true

You can precise repositories of metadata by setting : p2.metadata.repo and p2.artifact.repo.

An other result of setting the p2.gathering property to true is that root files contributed by features will be published into the artifact repository and associated metadata will be created. So, you have directly the feature’s root files installed.

There’s another great feature. Now you can choose the replacement of the .qualifier used in a product build.  Just set the p2.product.qualifier to the qualifier you want to use.

You can now easily export source bundles too. There’s an option to generate a source bundle for each generated plug-ins.

Eclipse 3.5 provides  facilities to publish features categories on export. (more info here).

This previous feature is quite useful, mostly if we look at the new software update skin!! If you have set no categories for your features, by default they won’t appeared.

You will have to checked out the “Group items by categories” options.

As we talked of the new software update skin. We can notice that the UI is greatly improved. And I found a little thing that I find useful : define names for software sites. (more info here)

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