Re: [p2-dev] The future of Eclipse upgrades

[Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ian, thanks for raising this - I'm very interested too.

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 10:13:51AM -0700, Ian Bull wrote:
> I had the pleasure of running Eclipse on Windows 7 and the Eclipse upgrade
> story concerns me a bit. On Windows 7 (and maybe Vista, I'm not sure), I was
> able to unzip an Eclipse install the Program Files directory and launch.
>  While this directory was writable by the unzip utility, it's not writable
> by Eclipse, and we are put into a shared install mode.
> 
> For the most part this works fine, however, we won't be able to upgrade
> (using p2) when SR1 comes out.  Eclipse has been designed so that you can
> install new plugins in a shared install, but you cannot upgrade the base
> (without becoming a super user).  Technically this is no different from *nix
> environments, however, I would argue that there is a perceived difference.

At least in Galileo, I get a related troubling behavior.  I can't even
use the update manager in a Program Files install without needing to
horse around a bit; the list of upgrade sites is stored in the
configuration directory.  At install time the configuration was in
C:\Program Files\...\configuration.  At run time, since that's not
writable, the configuration is automatically placed in the user's
Windows home directory.  No upgrade sites are initially configured.

> 1. You never had to become a Super User before (Window XP)
> 2. And more importantly, you could 'install' Eclipse without becoming a
> super user, so why do I need to become an SU to upgrade?

The answer to this bit is a weird Windows heuristic introduced along
with UAC in Vista; some programs, like things with "install" in the
name, automatically run as superuser.  Unless you've turned them off
locally, you probably got a UAC prompt.  I've never tried it just with
unzip though so maybe there's something else going on.  But Eclipse
isn't special and doesn't get run with privileges.

> I'm not even sure how to become a super user on Windows.

IIRC, right click on Eclipse, Run as Administrator.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
CodeSourcery