If you create a childplugin that somewhere references its parentplugin, the plugin target of the Ant buildscript won’'t compile the plugin properly.
As a workaround, I’‘ve been adding ordinary jar files of the parentplugin (not the jars generated by ant plugins, just a jar archive) to the childplugin/lib directory, but that’‘s confusing. You’'ll have to update all child plugins /lib directories whenever you significantly change the parent plugin, which adds unneeded difficulty to the build proces.
It would be nice if the Ant buildplugin macro would include the classes of the parentplugin, if one is defined. At execution time, the childplugin gets the parentsplugins PluginClassLoader, which does the same.
Some changes should probably be made in lines 958 to 963. Can someone explain to me how to check for and read the parentPlugin element from the plugin.xml file (I’‘ve never scripted Ant before - I had a look at the apache website, but couldn’‘t find what I was looking for)? After that, changes shouldn’'t be very difficult.