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20040825 Wednesday August 25, 2004

Eclipse tip o' the day By default, Eclipse expects all its plugins to be in $ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins. This doesn't work too well for upgrading since you have to copy all of your installed plugins to Eclipse everytime you upgrade. To solve this, you can place all your plugins in an external direct and point to them using a link file. To do this, create a links directory in $ECLIPSE_HOME and create a file inside it that points to an alternate location. The name of this file doesn't seem to matter, but it must end with a ".link" extension. In this file, put a path: 

path=C:\\Tools\\myplugins

Then in c:\Tools\myplugins, create an Eclipse-like directory structure so you end up with c:\Tools\myplugins\eclipse\plugins. Then drop your plugins in that directory. If you choose to use an alternate workspace as well, upgrading Eclipse will be as easy as copying in your links folder. BTW, here's more information on upgrading Eclipse.

Posted in Java at Aug 25 2004, 07:35:52 PM MDT 10 Comments