Background
I am developing an Eclipse RCP application with about 100 plug-ins. It's my responsibility to control the dependencies of these plug-ins. If the source code of one plug-in is changing and another plug-in is needed it's easy in Eclipse to add a new dependency by a quick-fix or the Manifest Editor.
My questions
Is there also a way to get informed, that a referenced plug-in is not anymore needed and can be removed from the Manifest file? My goal is to keep dependencies as minimal as possible. So is there a static code analyze tool or an Eclipse plug-in that covers this?
There is an unused dependencies analysis tool in the MANIFEST.MF editor.
Open the MANIFEST.MF editor and switch to the Dependencies tab. At the bottom right there is a 'Dependency Analysis' section which is usually collapsed. Expand this section and choose the 'Find unused dependencies' tool. This will run an analysis and suggest unused dependencies to be removed from from the MANIFEST.MF
This needs to be used with caution because it can be a bit too keen to remove dependencies when there are indirect dependencies.