How to set up for multi-product Eclipse plug-in development?

I have a set of plug-ins which need to support different Eclipse products. There is a core plug-in, which is product-independent, and an adaptation plug-in each for Product X, Product Y, etc.

Deployment-wise, I'm thinking one feature for the core plug-in and one for each product, containing the adaptation plug-in and having a dependency to the core feature, so the core plug-in gets installed without the user having to select it.

1) Is there a better way of structuring the features?

On the development side, I would like to be able to work with both the core and adaptation plug-ins within the same workspace, which as I understand it gives me two main options: a) working within each product using their respective installations as target platforms, or b) working in raw Eclipse with an explicitly defined target platform for each product.

2) What would be the best way to set up the development environment?

If option a), can I use the same workspace for different products or would I need to set up separate workspaces? In other words, are different Eclipse products able to share a workspace as long as they're all based on the same (say) major version, eg 3.x?

If option b), can Eclipse manage multiple simultaneous target platforms? In other words, can different plug-in projects within the same workspace be compiled against different target platforms during the same build? And if n开发者_如何学Goot, how could I automate switching between them so I wouldn't have to do that manually during a workspace build?

Or indeed, am I missing something fundamental and is there a much better way of doing all this?

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The short answer is you can do it either way.

You can have 1 workspace per product, and each workspace has the target platform of that product. At the moment, eclipse supports one target platform active per workspace, not per project though.

Or you can have eclipse and the 3rd party plugins you need as your target platform, and simply work on all 3 products and the common plugin in one workspace. If your total source plugins is <20, this would probably be fine. For >20, eclipse supports Working Set which would hide the plugin you are not working on at the moment.