[news.eclipse.tools] Re: Multiple users sharing an Eclipse install on Li

[Vlad Klicnik <klicnik@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Steve, ability to share a single install was one of the base design points
of Eclipse (this is one place you can say we've learned from our prior
experiences ;-) ). We have taken great care to ensure plugins don't rely on
having write access to the installation tree. In fact we have made it hard
for a plugin to know where exactly it is installed (all normal access is
through URLs using an eclipse protocol that does the magic mapping). So as
long as you launch the shared Eclipse with each user having their own
writeable workbench (tool state and actual resources) all should be well
(as you are finding out).

There may be cases where a plugin was written to rely on accessing its
directory. We do not make it easy to program this way, so this scenario
will be a case of someone consciously going out and programming around the
APIs we provide (I am mentioning this only because there are several
discussion threads in the newsgroup with questions along these lines).
These plugins would fail in your configuration.

The only other thing I can think of is that the Help> Software Update
function will be disabled for your users (cannot install/ update into
shared r/o tree). Updates to the shared install would need to be done by a
user with r/w access doing the update (using native installer or the update
support).