Vasanth Dharmaraj: Keeping Eclipse plugins separate

An excellent tip from Vasanth Dharmaraj providing an easy way to drag your third party plugins along as you move between versions of Eclipse:

Here is how to do it:

1. Create a folder called ‘links’ in your eclipse directory.

2. Create a file with the extension .link, say plugins.link.

3. Open the file and add a line ‘path=c:\myplugins’ and save the file.

4. Create the directory mentioned in the link file. (c:\myplugins)

5. Create a sub directory named ‘eclipse’ in the above directory. (c:\myplugins\eclipse)

6. Create a couple of sub directories named ‘features’ and ‘plugins’ in the above directory. (c:\myplugins\eclipse\features & c:\myplugins\eclipse\plugins)

7. Now put all the third party plugins in these directories.

8. (Re)start eclipse and voilà all the plugins in the separate directory are loaded.