Re: Re: [equinox-dev] OSGI Bundles: alternate manifest.mf location

["Alex Blewitt" <alex.blewitt@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 06/07/06, Simon J Archer <sarcher@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> While you explain that you don't like the default location, perhaps you
> could tell us why you want MANIFEST.MF to live somewhere else?

Just FYI -- sometimes projects are structured around a 'source' and
'output' hierarchies (c.f. normal Java projects). Quite often, if
they're Maven based, they will have 'src' and 'resources' as top-level
folders to categorise the difference between compilable resources
(e.g. *.java) and resource files that are copied as is (e.g.
*.properties). The normal way such things get mapped into Eclipse
projects is that you have a 'Source' source folder and a 'Resources'
resource folder, such that in the 'Build' output folder everything
appears in the correct (relative) location, and Build/ can be exported
in totality as a Jar (or, in the case of a Maven build, the
target/classes and target/resources).

The 'problem' with PDE is that it expects the manifest to be located
directly under the project root, which is somewhat odd since there's
no similar requirement for classes or any other resource to be located
under the project root; they're taken from the project's output/build
folder (forget the exact term here...)

On a somewhat related note, the same problem applies for generating
resources in output Jars with the PDE build, too. If you have
'bin.includes=resources/images', then the resultant directory in the
Jar is also called 'resources/images' which is less than desirable.
The problem is that there's no way of specifying 'from the path
"resources", treat everything under it as a relative resource in the
output Jar'. The case of the MANIFEST/META-INF is a specific example
of this problem.

Alex.