A new version of Eclipse just came out. Is there anything I can do to avoid having to manually hunt down my plugins again?

Question

Galileo came out the other day, and even though plugins under Eclipse are, IMO, just a little bit easier to deal with than Netbeans, it would still be really awesome if there was a simple way for me to upgrade to the new version (and take my plugins with me).

Any tips?

Answer 1

Not directly, AFAIK.

Here is the closest thing I came up with, under the assumption that my old Eclipse is recent enough so that it uses a similar form of update manager (P2).

In the old Eclipse, go to preferences->Install/Update->Available Software Sites. Pick the ones that are not built in (you will see a name for them, or at least a non-eclipse URL). You can select the ones you want and then export them to XML.

Now go to the new Eclipse, go to the same preference window, and import the update sites from the XML. Now, when you install new software, you should see your update sites although you will probably still have to manually pick options for plugins that offer multiple downloads.

Important caveat: Some plugin vendors actually offer different update sites for different Eclipse versions, so you would still be pointing at the old plugin. This would typically happen if you never updated your existing plugin to a new version. One common example of this is with Subsclipse, so you may want to manually upgrade that one.

Answer 2

Take a look into this blog entry: How to make your Eclipse plugin list survive an Eclipse upgrade

I also used the Yoxos service to build my "own" Eclipse distribution. I guess it should be easy possible to just upgrade the core elements in such a profile, keeping the plugins. It has included dependency checking, so it's very nice to get a distribution running.

Answer 3

I would recommend to read: "Install Plug-ins into Eclipse IDE", specifically written for eclipse3.5.

The method I use is to store all my plugin into one share a Dropins folder, and then launch my eclipse with the following line in the eclipse.ini:

-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.p2.reconciler.dropins.directory=/<myPath>/mySharedDropins

As long as this line is present in the eclipse.ini of any future eclipse, all of those new installation will detect and use my shared plugin.

Combine that with a fine-tuned eclipse.ini and you are good to go!

Answer 4

Try http://www.poweredbypulse.com/

Answer 5

I do this:

http://coders-log.blogspot.com/2009/06/manage-your-eclipse-install-with-local.html

Not sure how well I like the approach yet - I'm still trying it out. Essentially, I can create a patch of each plugin install, and the apply it to the new version.

Plus, I use this approach on other products, so I can use the same process everywhere.

Answer 6

In many cases you may/should be able to copy the plugin files from your Eclipse 3.4 
install directory (i.e. eclipse/plugins) over to your new Galileo plugins directory.

There are some exceptions, but they tried to keep the plugin API and binaries 
backwards compatible with the previous release.  

You can find more information in the eclipse/readme directory under your 
Galileo install directory.  

See filename: readme_eclipse.html      Section: "Compatibility with Previous Releases"