Plugin Product vs Feature Product

Plugin Products:

• No problem when building (Gui or headless) => all the required (the same than the required plugins computed in the launch configuration dialog when debugging the app) plugins are present
• The RCP application disk footprint is optimized !! No useless plugins
• No features are exported: as a result the features list tab of about dialog is empty !!!
• It seems that plugin products are not recommended for RCP with self update (I didnd’t tested that yet) ???

Feature Products:

• When exporting (headless), the only present plugins and features are the one listed in the .product file
• Need to create a “dependencies” features including all the required plugins OR depend on all the features containing the required plugins => bring a lot of useless plugins
• Features listed in the about dialog

In my case, I decided to use a Feature Product and then to “manually” create a feature including all the 90 plugins required by my RCP.

Because I am lazy and hate repetitive tasks, I wrote a simple Java main parsing a launch configuration file (.launch located in the workspace metadata folder) and generating from a template the feature with all the required dependencies. Is there any other existing way to do that ??

Hope this can help others, and if you need my simple Java feature dependency creator, just ask it.

Manu