Installing external plug-ins manually

Although it is preferred to install additional plug-ins into the Rodin platform using the Update Manager of Eclipse, this might not always be practical. In this case, a manner to install these plug-ins is to emulate either manually or using ad-hoc scripts the operations normally performed by the Update Manager.

This manual installation of plug-ins is described below, using the example of the B4free provers.

Finding the Update Site =

The first thing to do is to find the update site from which the plug-ins are downloaded by the Rodin platform. For the default sites, one can find their list in file feature.xml in the org.eventb.ide feature. In a regular installation, this file has path features/org.eventb.ide_0.8.2/feature.xml relative to the root of the installation tree.

From the URL given in this file, download the corresponding site.xml file that describes the available features from the corresponding site. For instance, for the B4free provers, the URL in the feature.xml file is

 http://bmethod.com/update_site/b4free_provers

Hence, the file to retrieve is

 http://bmethod.com/update_site/b4free_provers/site.xml

At the time of writing, this file contains: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <site> <feature url="features/com.b4free.rodin_0.8.3.jar" id="com.b4free.rodin" version="0.8.3" os="linux,macosx,win32" arch="ppc,x86"/> </site>