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Limitations of running plugins as jars (packed) or dirs (upacked) [message #1837112]

Fri, 22 January 2021 04:52

Eclipse User

Hello everybody,

today I was wondering what are the limitations of installing/running a plugin packed (as a jar) vs. unpacked (as dir)?

What do I mean by un-/packed?

Within a feature.xml you can declare if a plugin can be unpacked or not https://help.eclipse.org/2019-09/topic/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/reference/misc/feature_manifest.html?resultof=%22%75%6e%70%61%63%6b%22%20
Within the plugins MANIFEST.MF you can declare if a plugin can be unpacked or not (Eclipse-BundleShape: jar|dir) https://help.eclipse.org/2019-09/topic/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/reference/misc/bundle_manifest.html?resultof=%22%75%6e%70%61%63%6b%22%20

As far as I know, there is no documentation about the limitations of either version.

The only things I could find are rumors like:

In case a plug-in contains native code, e.g., dll files or others, which do not work from inside a JAR file, the plug-in itself should be unpacked.
If a class within a plugin needs to access a resource via an absolute path.

The first rumors seem to be not true: https://www.eclipse.org/lists/tycho-user/msg08724.html

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