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

[Steve Francisco <cisco@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Vlad, that's good news.  I believe it is reasonable to have software
updates installable only by someone with root authority.  Theoretically it
should be possible to have Help > Software Update work, but prompt the user for
the root password for proper authentication.  I've seen this done when you use
RPM and aren't logged in as root.
-- Steve

Vlad Klicnik wrote:

> 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).