Moving the eclipse installation directory causes problems

Question

I recently updated my Eclipse installation directories to suit the different tastes of Eclipse (Helios, Indigo, Juno), but then it caused a problem as the ".eclipse" directory (which lives in my home directory) has auxiliary folders that identify the version of eclipse, but end with a suffix that I think identifies the installation directory

for example: org.eclipse.platform_3.6.1_12345678 

So, by changing the Eclipse installation directory and then downloading Eclipse, a new subfolder was created and knowledge about my plugins was lost.

Why does Eclipse do this? And how can I manage Eclipse so that I can bind 2 directories together so that I can freely move the installation folder without breaking anything?

Is there any good practice managing multiple Eclipse installations regarding configuration (plugins) and workspaces?

Answer 1

By default, eclipse always saves its local configuration in the .eclipse home folder. However, you can override the default value.

In the eclipse.ini file for each of your different versions, you can add the following JVM parameter (make sure you add this line below the -vmargs line)

 -Dosgi.configuration.area=@user.home/.eclipse<version> 

Where

 <version> 

is any identifier you select for this particular version of eclipse.

This should help to separate the different configurations and prevent them from stomping on each other.

Hope this helps.