Several versions of a plugin in a feature.xml

问题:

I've created an feature-based Eclipse product where all dependencies respectively external plugins are specified in a dependencies feature project. Some dependencies need different versions of the same plugin. How can I specify several versions of a plugin in a feature.xml? Eclipse seems to always use the current version of a plugin. I've tried to add a dependency with a strict version interval, e.g. [1.6.0.v201011041432,1.6.0.v201011041432], in the feature.xml but Eclipse doesn't accept this format.

回答1:

I had a similar problem when running a feature based product within Eclipse (Kepler) where multiple versions of the same bundle were involved.

In the end I used a workaround - I changed the symbolic names of the bundles, so they all have different names. If you consequently use Import-Package instead of Require-Bundle this will make no difference in the dependencies you define for bundles or in the OSGi runtime, only in your Feature definition. This solution is not pretty, but at least it's rather easy to do.

Thinking about that OSGi is intended to target exactly this kind of use case where you have multiple versions of the same dependency/bundle it's rather strange how bad the support in Eclipse is, if you actually have this kind of use case.