Eclipse plugin deployment: couldn't find a bundle file

Question

I am developing an Eclipse plugin, in the Eclipse Kepler platform that I develop the plugin, I add a file: bundle org.eclipse.jface.databinding 1.6.200 as one of the dependencies. When I tried to install the plugin in Eclipse Juno in another machine, it failed. And the error message is: ...bundle org.eclipse.jface.databinding 1.6.200' but it could not be found.

Could anyone tell me how to solve the problem?

Answer 1

When developing Eclipse plugins you have to think carefully about your dependencies. OSGi (on which Eclipse is built) has the ability, unlike normal Java JAR dependencies) to specify versions and/or version ranges for dependencies. So you need to always think about what version range you want to support when developing plugins.

In your case, version 1.6.200 of org.eclipse.jface.databinding is what is in the latest releases of Eclipse (Luna and Kepler), but Juno has an older version (1.6.0). So if you want your plugin to be compatible with Juno you need to specify a version range in your dependency on org.eclipse.jface.databinding. Look at how many of the Eclipse plugins declare their own depdencies for examples.

You really should read more about it to educate yourself (this isn't trivial stuff like with normal Java projects just adding JARs with no version information). Here are some useful links:

• https://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Version_Numbering
• Plug-in development really should be done with a Target Platform. See here.
• This question and answer also has some interesting points, specifically about the difference between importing packages and depending on bundles.

There is a lot to understand about this stuff; it's not wise to take a naive approach, but sadly most tutorials gloss over or totally ignore these aspects of dependency management.