Exposing packages to selective plugins

C++ has a nice concept of friend - you can declare a method/class as a friend. The method/class has the privilege of accessing the private data as well. Java has the concept of default. If you don't specify public/private/protected, the member is accessible to the other classes in the same package. sort-of-friend functionality.

An Eclipse can expose selective packages to its dependencies. How to have the sort-of-friend functionality to few plugins? I means, what if it want to give access only to few pluings, say for the test plugin only and not to other plugins? You can set the package visibility accordingly. In the Runtime tab of the plugin.xml editor, select the exported package and in the right hand side, select the plugins to which you want to expose this package. Simple?