META-INF/MANIFEST.MF not always copied to the binary folder

[giamma]

In some rare occasions, the PDE2Virgo builder fails to copy the plug-in MANIFEST.MF folder to the binary folder during build.

When this happens the application typically fails to run, because the project is not managed as a proper OSGi bundle, which means the activator is not started, declarative services don't work etc.

The issue is easy to spot in the server log because when the MANIFEST.MF is not copied, the log reports that the plug-in version is 0.0.0. In such case, simply make a full clean and rebuild of the plug-in project and restart the server.

[giamma]

It is possible that the builder fails to copy MANIFEST.MF to binary if another META-INF folder exists in a source folder.

Actually, the builder implements some logic to try to deal with such a situation, but maybe the issue is in the standard Eclipse Java builder which does not expect to find a pre-existing META-INF folder in /bin when it copies the META-INF folder located in the source folder.

Example: certain resources that are normally located in the META-INF folder, for example JPA persistence.xml, must be located in the class path for JPA to work. So in such case it is necessary to have a META-INF folder inside one of the source folders in addition to the META-INF folder in the root of the project that contains the OSGi Manifest.

[giamma]

It turns out that the issue may not be related to pde2virgo but could be a problem in Virgo Tools. In fact I was able to reproduce the problem and to verify that pde2virgo was working properly as follows:

1. modify the MANIFEST.MF of a plug-in project
2. build
3. the updated file was present in /bin/META-INF
4. despite the file being updated, Virgo Tools did not republish the bundle to Virgo Server.

This flow occurred only once, usually the Virgo Tools correctly publish the modified files to the Virgo Server.