Eclipse Plugin Development: Is there a way to control installer messages about missing dependencies of my plugin?

Question

I am developing an eclipse plugin which depends on Eclipse platform 4.2 (Juno) and cannot be installed on older versions of eclipse. When the user tries to install my plugin (via update site) on an old eclipse, the Eclipse installer stops him and shows the following message:

Cannot complete the install because one or more required items could not be found.
Software being installed: Feature 1.0.3 (com.test.feature.feature.group 1.0.3)
Missing requirement: Test 1.0.3 (com.test 1.0.3) requires 'bundle org.eclipse.core.runtime 3.8.0' but it could not be found
Cannot satisfy dependency:
From: Feature 1.0.3 (com.test.feature.feature.group 1.0.3)
To: com.test 0.0.0

Not many people can understand from this error message that all they need is a newer version of Eclipse. I would like to change this message and display something like:

"Error installing: this plugin requires Eclipse version 4.2 (Juno) or above"

Is that even possible?

Answer 1

You can't customize the error messages, but p2 just (with Kepler) got a lot smarter in trying to figure out what would need to be changed in the existing installation in order to allow the installation of something new.

So in this case, the p2 remediation support would probably propose to update the installed product so that the Feature can be installed.