dropins文件夹中的Eclipse p2插件已安装但未激活

Question

I have an eclipse product built against eclipse platform 3.6.2. I have other external plugins (no features) that are built separately (against the same platform) and my product does not depend on them, but they do depend on some plugins in my product. These external plugins makes contributions to the menus.

When I run my application from Eclipse and I add the extenral plugins to my launcher, they work just fine and I can notice their menu contributions. But when I build my application using PDE (with p2 support) and I add the external plugins to the dropins folder. They do get detected in my list of installed plugins in the product installation details but the Plugin.start() does never get called, nor I see their menu contributions, also when I check them in the configuration tab, I notice that they are listed as < Plugin ID> [Starting] . But when running from eclipse, in the Configuration they are listed as [Active]

I did try to add the extension point org.eclipse.ui.startup but it didn't change anything, it doesn't get called either.

Could anybody please help me with such a problem, or even guide me on how to debug it, I can't seem to make the p2 to print any useful debugging information when installing my pluigns.

Answer 1

Its great that you have built them using p2 support. This means should now have a P2 metadata repository. Now to install, just dropping the the stuff into dropins folder is not enough. I should recommend to instead 'install' them using the Help -> Install new software...