In the manifest file for an eclipse plugin its possible to add jar files and folders to the classpath (on the Runtime tab).
In the root of my plugin I have a folder lib containing a-1.0.1.jar, b-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar. But only when I select each jar separately:
Bundle-ClassPath: .,
lib/a-1.0.1.jar,
lib/b-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
...can they be used inside my project. Why is it not possible to add them to the classpath by adding the common root folder only:
Bundle-ClassPath: .,
lib/
?
No, you can't. Eclipse is based on OSGi, which is the platform providing MANIFEST.MF support to build plugins.
When you set values under Bundle-ClassPath, OSGi search into each one to find class files. So you can put folders containing Java packages and class files. When you put a jar file, it is uncompressed in memory and viewed by OSGi as a regular folder, still searching for class files.
Unfortunately, there is no way to load all jar from a folder. No wildcard mechanism or something like that is allowed here.
