Eclipse - building a feature project

Question

So I'm deploying eclipse projects. I have a set of plugins that live in a 'feature project' and that feature project lives in an 'Update site' project.

All goes well on first build. Sweet as a nut.

When I make some changes to the feature project and then want to rebuild in the update site project I go to click my 'build all' button....

...but I get the following error...

I presume this is a versioning issue - my only way around this appears to be that I remove the feature project entirely from the update site project, and then re-add the version of it that does not have the explicit versioning number

...but this feels awkward, is there some more effective method I should be using?

(EDIT - I've been asked for what happens when I click 'more details' here's the photo)

Answer 1

I wish I could give references for this, but I find the documentation on how update site projects work to be woefully lacking. Hopefully this explanation helps.

What should happen here is that on the first build, your reference to your feature gets turned from being referred to as featureProject (1.0.0.qualifier) to featureProject (1.0.0.201204171009). You can see this change in the site.xml, and corresponding jar files should be built in the updateSite\features and updateSite\plugins directories, with the feature jar being referred to by the updated site.xml.

The second time you build, it is supposed to build a new feature and plugin jar, replacing the qualifier with the current timestamp.

In your case though, something bad is happening in between. One symptom is obviously that error, but another is the 'select feature' dialog box you snapshotted. Notice that the link for the featureProject (1.0.0.201204172009) looks the same as all the installed features in your eclipse instance, as opposed to the feature that you have the source for: featureProject (1.0.0.201204172009)

Did you perhaps, in an intermediate step, use the update site you built to install your plug-in in to this eclipse instance? If so, I suspect that would confuse the build process, especially if you also removed the feature jar from the updateSite\features directory.