Install the eclipse 3.4 plug-in

Dropins

Provisioning operations shoshould generally occur using the P2 UI, or by invoking P2 tools or APIs. however, there are situations where scripts need to install plugins and features via file system operations, and have the new content dynamically discovered by the system either at startup, or while running. to support this kind of low-level manipulation of the system, P2 supports the notionWatched Directories. A watched directory is a place where a user or script can drop files and have them discovered by P2. varous indexes ies can be applied to watched directories to configure when they are checked for new content, and whether to eagerly install discovered content.

The eclipse platform ships with a default watched directory calledDropins. 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 likePluginsDirectory was used in the past. A subtle twist on old behavior here is that plug-ins and features added toDropinsFolder are properly installed into the system rather than being forced in. this means P2 has an opportunity to confirm that the new plug-in doesn' t conflict with other installed plug-ins, and it can even go out and fetch any missing prerequisites of the newly dropped in plug-ins. this also means you can later use the GUI to install extra functionality that depends on the plug-ins inDropinsFolder, since P2 knows about them and can reason about their dependencies. In other words, new plug-ins installed viaDropinsFolder behave exactly like plug-ins installed via the user interface. Note that updating plug-ins which are located underDropinsFolder using the P2 UI will result in the updated plug-ins being saved under the main Eclipse/plugins and Eclipse/features folders and not underDropinsHierarchy as siblings to the older versions of the plug-ins, as might be expected.

Supported dropins formats

The dropins folder supports a variety of layouts, depending on the scale of your application and the desired degree of separation of its parts. the simplest layout is to just drop plug-ins in either jar or directory format directly into the dropins Folder:

 eclipse/   dropins/     org.eclipse.core.tools_1.4.0.200710121455.jar     org.eclipse.releng.tools_3.3.0.v20070412/       plugin.xml       tools.jar       ... etc ...   ...

You can also drop in the traditional eclipse application or extension layout directly in the dropins Folder:

 eclipse/   dropins/     eclipse/       features/       plugins/

If you have varous different components being dropped in, and you want to keep them separate, you can add an additional layer of folders immediately below the dropins folder that tradin traditional eclipse extensions:

 eclipse/   dropins/     emf/       eclipse/         features/         plugins/     gef/       eclipse/         features/         plugins/     ... etc ...

Finally, you can add link files as in the traditional eclipse links Folder:

 eclipse/   dropins/     emf.link

Address: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox_p2_Getting_Started