Ed Burnette over at EclipsePowered brings a discussion that has been going on over in Eclipse land to the surface. In the 3.1 cycle packages of plugins are now exported in the plugin's manifest.mf file. If you don't export a package it isn't visible. There is also no export "*" functionality. I guessing it is highly likely that access to new "internal" packages will not be exposed by default. While this change was added for performance reasons, it will have a definite impact on Eclipse plugin development going forward.
Eclipse Access restrictions brouhaha Wassim Melhem posted a somewhat cryptic note on the eclipse-dev committer's list tonight asking for a new agenda item on access restrictions in tomorrow's planning meeting. He writes:
I don't want to overhype this, but it's safe to say that the outcome of this discussion will change the face of plug-in development forever.