Comments on: Eclipse 3.1 M4 – an early Christmas gift from the Eclipse team

By: Craig

Craig — Sat, 25 Dec 2004 23:32:39 +0000

I attempted to migrate my plugins from 3.1M3 to M4 by simply copying the plugins directory. This didn’t work. I copied the directories for the plugins before I started up M4, but eclipse didn’t recognize them. I ended up having to pull them down from their respective update sites from scratch. It did pickup all my project properties however, so thats the most important thing.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 24 Dec 2004 14:54:03 +0000

Plugins are meant to be compatible between Eclipse versions with the same major version number (the first number). In addition to that, Eclipse 3.0 has backwards compatibility with plugins designed for the 2.0 Eclipse versions. Since 3.1 has the same major version number, you should be OK.

Yes, copying plugins to the plugins directory is the installation method. :) Eclipse reads the directory at load time, so if you already have Eclipse running when you copy the plugins you’ll have to restart Eclipse.

By: Craig

Craig — Fri, 24 Dec 2004 11:26:38 +0000

Thanks for the tip, I’ll give it a whack. Can I migrate my plugins by copying them to the plugins directory in the same way?

By: Ryan Lowe

Ryan Lowe — Thu, 23 Dec 2004 04:41:00 +0000

Craig, you can copy your workspace to the new Eclipse directory *before* the first time you run it, and the workspace will be converted to support the new milestone.

Watch out though, you can’t convert backwards! That’s why I always use copies.

By: Craig

Craig — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 13:56:46 +0000

I dig eclipse as much as the next guy, but I really hate having to blow away my eclipse rig just to try out the latest milestone. Why can’t you just hit the update site to get the latest bits? I’m not saying I want it to be totally backwards compat, but there’s got to be an alternative.