In one of my previous posts I had some issues to get the headless 3.6.x PDE build running for a few of my RCP projects. But I quickly got many very helpful comments and now I have the build up and running on Windows Vista/7. I have to admit that the tricks I describe below considered to be hacks rather than a clean solution, but on the other hand it works at least for my RCP applications.
Trick 1: Modify the target 3.6.x platform
Usually I create my target platforms just by unzipping an Eclipse SDK and the corresponding delta pack. But this did not work with 3.6.x, as described in my previous post about PDE build. I got lots of unresolved dependencies. The trick to get rid of many of them is to delete everything from the target platform except the plugins and features directory. If your RCP application is not using p2 related stuff, then there is a good chance that the build will succeed. In my RCP applications I include the feature org.eclipse.equinox.p2.user.ui in my product configurations, that leads to an unresolved dependency to org.eclipse.compare. If you see the same in your build, then trick 2 might help.
Trick 2: Manually remove dependency to org.eclipse.compare (if not needed)
If your RCP application just uses p2 for self-updating, then you probably don’t need a dependency to org.eclipse.compare. How to remove it manually I described in my blog post “Eclipse RCP p2 self-update with Eclipse 3.6.x“.
With above modifications I got the build running again. Please let me know, if these tricks work on other platforms, too. I explicitly want to thank Alexander, Albert MacSweeny and Frode for their helpful comments in my previous post about PDE build.
Have Fun!