In the context of creating a custom Eclipse distribution for a development team.
How would I go about building a custom Eclipse distribution containing a specific set of plugins? Would it be difficult to also add a kind of update site to put specific versions of the plug-ins from which the customized eclipse would update?
Eclipse is not one of those applications that need to be "installed" since it can just be copied into a directory structure and have shortcuts set up for running it (a la the BIRT all-in-one distributions).
I would suggest installing it on one machine, getting all the plug-ins installed, then just zip up the directory and use that to distribute to other machines.
And running your own update site isn't that difficult, you just need a server into which you install only the versions of the plug-ins you need and ensure your distribution points to that server before making the zip file. There's nothing stopping your developers from connecting to another site as well.
Just zip up the C:\eclipse\plugins directory and distribute.
Just ensure that developers start Eclipse with the "-clean" option to ensure that any changes are incorporated.
I may interesting to anybody trying to assemble their own Eclipse distro to get acquainted with the Eclipse Packaging Project http://www.eclipse.org/epp/. To setup a private update site, Sonatype's Nexus Professional serves exactly that purpose (commercial license).