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When a plugin needs to reference some external jars you can setup linked resources so eclipse see those jars inside the plugin project. For example, when using maven we create a link like M2_REPO/javax/mail/mail/1.4/mail-1.4.jar -> plugin/mail-1.4.jar every works fine in Eclipse using this configuration (building, running inside eclipse as an application or a product), but when you try exporting your plugin PDE is not able to compile it. Adding the required jar to "jars.extra.classpath" in build.properties doesn't help since PDE don't see linked resources. We found out that adding the full path for the resource to build.properties ( jars.extra.classpath = x:/repo/javax/mail/mail/1.4/mail-1.4.jar ) makes PDE happy and the project compile successfully during an export. However, this makes the project stop working in eclipse, since eclipse considers absolute paths in build.properties broken (you can't add external jars to build properties from the UI, and they are marked are errors when you try to build). If PDE can't work with linked resources, why not allowing absolute paths in the "jars.extra.classpath" entry (since it actually appears to work... not sure if this is expected or not)? This is similar to BUG 66177 but it's specifically related to linked dependencies and could be easy to fix (the full-path workaround appears to be already working for export but not for internal build).
What build are you using? Please try a 3.3 integration build, I20061003-0800 or later. This sounds similar to bug 158589 which was fixed.
To work around the issue you could try to bundle up the libraries and then refer to them on the jars.extra.classpath using platform:/plugin/bundleSymblicName. Those libraries would still have to be loaded in the IDE and in the target. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 66177 ***
