Same question stated another way: Can an Eclipse project be both a plugin project and a feature project?
We have 3 Eclipse projects in our source code for every component in an application, like this:
pkg.component.namepkg.component.name.rcppkg.component.name.rcp.featurepkg.component.name is a plugin project that contains all of the non-rcp Java source code for the component.
pkg.component.name.rcp is a plugin project that contains the RCP-specific Java source code.
pkg.component.name.rcp.feature is a feature project that only contains two files: build.properties and feature.xml. build.properties contains one line: bin.includes = feature.xml
Is there any reason why we can't define the feature in the pkg.component.name.rcp project?
Reducing our project count by roughly a third would be nice.
One of my colleagues told me he had problems doing that and I don't want to troubleshoot something that isn't possible or that is proscribed just to have fewer projects.
It's not possible to do. While plugins use the MANIFEST.MF and plugin.xml and features use the feature.xml, both use the build.properties (to allow building) and they both need to fill it with different things. They also both have different .project information (different builders, different natures) for use within eclipse.