The best way to clean your plugins out of eclipse 3.2

Question

Since the configuration manager and update manager for eclipse 3.2 is devoid of nice options for REMOVING or DELETING all my plugins it can be cumbersome to deal with needing to get your plugins in order. Just getting your dependencies worked out can be a nightmare when you have installed one version too high than you needed depending on the jdk version you are developing for.

Other than trashing the files in the plugins and features directory (which sometimes works) what other options do we have in a M$ environment?

In the situation where you are using RAD 7 you have to deal with the shared SDP70Shared folder too which is a bit ethereal as well.

I want to see a fool proof way to clean house for regular eclipse 3.x, RAD, or any all in one package that will work.

Answer 1

You could do a complete uninstall of eclipse and use a custom eclipse builder like http://www.yoxos.com/ondemand/][1] to create a build with the base set of plugins you use. I don't recall how eclipse is configured in Windows, but in Linux there's usually a hidden project directory in your work space that you may want to remove just in case. I'm not sure if there's any registry settings you need to worry about though.

Answer 2

Eclipse 3.2 has "uninstall" feature for plugins under Help->Software updates->Manage configuration.

Eclipse 3.4 has the same functionality under Help->Software updates->Installed software

Answer 3

The best solution I have found thus far is to uninstall and rebuild from scratch. Sometimes you can delete files in the plugins dir and run CCleaner on the registry and that might fix issues but it is problematic depending on the situation. If there were an application that really could make sense of eclipse plugins everyone would use it but there isn't.