I am using Eclipse 3.6, and looking to update the installation to newer release, that is 3.7. Instead of downloading the whole package, can I just perform a update(distribution update)? Is there exists any way to easily achieve this?
I would not recommend that. Eclipse minor versions are more like major versions (updated once a year), so most (if not all) of the plugins are updated in the meantime. There are 2 aspects here:
The download time for all of the updated plugins may be higher than the download time for the whole bundle.
There is no guarantee that all of the plugins may be upgraded seamlessly. That means that your updated environment may not work well together.
One indication that helps is that each new eclipse release comes with new update sites. My rule of thumb is, that updates are possible with the same update site, but with a complete new version with a new update site, I always install the new release all together.
Start Eclipse; from the Help menu, choose "Check for Updates". It starts searching for updates - this may take a while, but when finished you can see a list of available updates for Eclipse (including any supported plugins that you installed). Select the update(s) you want to install and click "Next".
Related
I don't recall the "install new updates" feature ever offering to perform a major release, certainly not without explaining that it's doing so like just happened with Juno. I unintentionally updated and it appears to have done an in-place update. This whole process is new behavior, right?
Is there any way to safely downgrade back to Indigo?
You can also go to Help>About>Installation Details>Installation History. If you select a configuration prior to your last update, you can ask p2 to try and revert to that configuration (it will try and re-download any older plugins that have been deleted by the upgrade from the repositories available in the preferences).
Get a copy of Indigo and unzip it to a new directory.
Add your other Eclipse plug-ins from their web sites.
Zip up your newly created version of Indigo so you can restore it if you accidentally upgrade again.
My eclipse runs horribly slow because I have thousands of plugins installed on it. I spoke with another friend who uses eclipse but he has none. I feel like none of these are necessary and I didn't even install so many. I have thousands of plugins and I tried reinstaling eclipse but I need to find a way to remove every single eclipse plugin.
Attempting to delete a plugin manually takes up to 5 minutes per plugin, so it could take me months or years before actually deleting all of these by hand.
Is there a feature in eclipse to delete all the plugins? Also I'm using WINDOWS XP
First, you need to understand that virtually everything in Eclipse is a plugin. Eclipse has a very small core runtime (Equinox) that loads all features from plugins. You can't just "delete every plugin" as doing so would leave you with nothing.
Also, just because a plugin is installed does not mean that it is always loaded or taking up resources. Eclipse uses a "lazy loading" architecture that will only load a plugin when some feature that it provides is actually invoked. Some plugins are probably written poorly in such a way that they are loaded too aggressively, but that would be the rare exception. So, in general, having lots of plugins is not a problem for performance.
If you do have a plugin that you want to remove, you can not just delete it from the plugins folder - as you've seen that will screw up your Eclipse installation. Don't do that.
One way to manage the features that you have installed, including installing ones that are able to be uninstalled, is to open the About dialog, then click the Installation Details button. There you'll be presented with a list of features that have been installed; you can select a feature and if it's possible to uninstall it the Uninstall... button will be enabled.
Often it's one bad third-party plugin/feature (not something from eclipse.org) that causes an Eclipse installation to have problems; try to find what it might be by process of elimination (uninstall all third-party plugins that you might have installed since your Eclipse was fresh).
Finally, as a last resort, it is trivial to remove Eclipse completely (just delete it from your file system) and re-install it fresh.
Having said all that, performance problems are usually due to an underpowered machine. What kind of processort do you have? How much RAM does your system have available after Windows boots up? Have you specified memory settings in eclipse.ini?
We have been having an interesting issue with the Eclipse update when some of our users update our feature/plugin to the latest release. Please see screenshot attached.
We have observed that in some cases the feature updates (and shows in the about dialog) the correct version number but when we take a look at the plugin details some of the plugins show the correct version but some of them still show the older version numbers even when the latest jars are in the plugins folder. Does anyone know why this would happen and how can we avoid this. This behavior is not consistent in all installation but we have seen it happening in Eclipse 3.5.
Will appreciate any help.
The only thing that I can think of is that some of your plugins are not contained in your feature, but are dependent on plugins that are included in the feature.
Eg- Feature A v1.0.0.x contains Plugin 1 v1.0.0.x and plugin 1 depends on plugin 2 with no version constraints.
If you have A v1.0.0.x, 1 v1.0.0.x and 2 v1.0.0.x installed, and upgrade A to v1.1.0.x, 1 will be upgraded to v1.1.0.x, but 2 will be left unchanged.
So, the thing to check here is to make sure that when you install your product, all plugins that are installed are contained inside of a feature. And, when you perform an update, all of the features are updated together.
I downloaded and installed Eclipse using Yoxos a few months ago. Since then, several of the plugins I downloaded as part of the install have been updated. In particular, the App Engine sdk has gone through 4 or 5 point releases, and GWT went from 1.7 to 2.0. The yoxos "software updates" tool seems painfully unaware of these updates though. How do I update these plugins? Is it a matter of waiting until Yoxos updates their database of plugins?
Can you not update directly from Eclipse ?
Help -> Check for updates
That will normally check for Eclipse framework and plugin updates.
You can update from anywhere, Pulse, Eclipse. If you go to the Eclipse site download page you can see many different providers of updates. Just get their download links and go to Help -> Install Software and hit the add button to add them. Then it will pick up updates from any of these sites. All of the plugins have unique names and versions so it does not matter where you get them.
You can update via the Eclipse mechanisms as the others describe. Then you risk running into the compatibility problems all Eclipse users have that put together plug-ins from a number of update sites. The idea of a distribution like Yoxos is to have a defined state of plug-ins that are checked for compatibility; compare with Linux distributions.
In a distribution you don't always have the latest version of a software, but it works and it's comfortable getting updates.
On Jan 6, the Yoxos Distribution had the latest update that - among others - includes the updates you asked above.
yoxos.ondemand.com also has a feedback button on the right side, so you can get your answers directly from the developers instead of hoping that they find your question in unrelated 3rd party forums :-)
In the past I have had problems upgrading from release to release of Eclipse. I was wondering how the Eclipse users on StackOverflow dealt with upgrading from release to release of Eclipse.
Is using a Distro the solution?
Staying on a past release point until you are forced forward, a good idea?
Lately I have just reloaded from scratch; renaming my root Eclipse dir and downloaded the latest release, plus an update cycle. I have only lost my workspaces (no code was lost) once using this method.
Thanks in advance
I usually just rename the old one to something like eclipse3.3 and install the new one in the same place. Since a lot of plugins usually break with a new version anyway, in my experience, I find that to do this and then reinstall my plugins is the easiest solution. There are rarely any problems with the workspace itself.
Starting with Eclipse 3.5, it should be possible to update in-place to new major versions...but only if the update will leave you with a clean/working install.
The key thing you will need for this to work is to add the update site for the new eclipse release. The most comprehensive list of updates I've seen is at http://ekkescorner.wordpress.com/eclipse/update-sites/
I always use the built-in update system. Go to Help -> Software Updates
I use Yoxos on-demand. I've found it a lot easier to upgrade this way. It allows you to pick up the plug-ins you need and then it resolves the dependencies automatically. That way I can quickly build a new Eclipse version that contains all the features that the old one had with less hassle.