I started a thread over on the platform newsgroup in this
regard (eclipse.platform, “how to create and install a feature patch”).
Francis Upton suggested I post here. Essentially, I have submitted a bug and developed
a patch to the Java code formatter. Now I want to try it out on a clean version
of the Eclipse IDE. What are the best practices for doing this?
The available documentation is spotty at best, and so far
doing a feature Patch is not working (Paul Webster is currently working with me
on it via the newsgroup). Ideally, I would like to do something like a plugin
fragment to patch one or more platform plugins, which would then be
incorporated into a feature patch. However, the documentation for plugin
fragments indicates that this is not what they are intended for since loading
order cannot be guaranteed (or something like that). So, for now, I am simply
trying to replace the whole plugin (org.eclipse.jdt.core) via a feature patch.
In any case, the issue of how to patch the eclipse platform
is a real one, especially if mere mortals are intended to contribute to the
platform (they should be able to easily test their patches first, which does
not seem to be the case). Also, there seem to be a number of “issues”
in the existing 3.5 p2 update manager. I have begun to note these in bug
27102.
--jon