Description Roland Tepp 2009-07-06 11:43:44 EDT

(copied from bug 57349 comment 33)

I was recently discussing with a friend of mine the problem of multiple eclipse installations could be solved by using bundle pooling and custom dynamic bootstrapping of eclipse with appropriate profile.

With bundle pooling one could have the entire world of eclipse plug-ins in a single bundle pool but only bootstrap with those enabled that are allowed by the chosen profile. This would severely cut down the wasted disk space that is required for maintaining multiple installations of eclipse with sometimes overlapping set of plug-ins/features.

If done right, the launcher could for example in addition to selecting your workspace ask you to choose your "eclipse profile" (and possibly remember to bind the profile to the workspace).

This way we would not need to install multiple instances of Eclipse and still gain the benefits of having separate IDE configurations for "Java" vs "J2EE" vs "Modeling" development...

As a possible user of this feature I envision that the bundle pooling be handled almost unobtrusively by prompting for the desired profile upon eclipse start up just like with (and maybe even at the same time as) selecting the workspace. 

The prompt should allow us to create a brand new profile or use the default one (based on the downloaded package?) or allow selecting from a set of preconfigured profiles.

The way I see this, the (default) bundle pool would be hosted at the install location and all the profiles would also be loaded from there. This way - installing new capabilities like Modeling or CDT on top of, for example, RCP packages would be handled as they are today. This would also allow, for those who wish to do so, install multiple separate isolated eclipse installations just as they do today.

If this idea has any merit, I am more than happy to elaborate more on the possible use cases and usage scenarios.