How Do You Manage Your Eclipse Installation

Programmer Question

How do you manage your Eclipse installation, i.e. the basic installation, plug-ins and workspace settings with regard to consistent updates (including major ones, 3.5 => 3.6) and usage on two or more computers (desktop + notebook).

My current setup is to basically manage the installation on several installations in parallel, i.e. manually add new plug-ins I installed on one to the other, and when I haven't used one in a long time to copy the whole directory from one location to the other.
For updates I use run it about once a month to get the latest versions, major updates I do manually by downloading the basic distribution and re-installing all the plug-ins in the matching version for the new major Eclipse version.

However, this approach has some drawbacks:

• time intensive


• update inconsistencies (Update sites change location, update doesn't work because of some version inconsistency between plug-ins that requires a lot of manual fixing, etc) (this has gotten better with 3.5 but still bugs me)


• no "global" update site, I manually have to manage several locations

I tried alternatives like Yoxos for configuration management but there plug-ins were missing and / or not that well tested together as I expected.

I took a look at Idea as an IDE, the one thing I really loved was the update management: centralized and 90% of the functionality I'd be using are provided as a core that is tested and updated as one.

Thus the question: How do you manage your Eclipse installations and deal with updates?

From my experience with other Eclipse users they have at least the same problem with updates, but I haven't heard of a solution yet.

Find the answer here