[platform-update-dev] Install configuration location

["Dejan Glozic" <dejan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

One of the 3.0 plan items that we want to address is the location of the
install configuration. At the moment, install state is in workspace
metadata, which causes many problems when multiple workspaces are used. We
want to address this in a long-term way in 3.0.

However, if you have a product that is/will be based on Eclipse 2.1, you
can exert some control over the state if you launch Eclipse using
-configuration command line argument. Similar to '-data', you can control
where the configuration file will be stored (the syntax is '-configuration
<URL of the config file>', e.g. '-configuration file:d:
\somedir\platform.cfg'). Update Manager state will be stored alongside the
configuration file. Using this argument will allow you to make the
configuration independent of the workspace i.e. switching workspaces will
not trigger partial or full reconciliation or ignore rollback.

A good place to put a configuration file is in the location returned by
Java's call to 'System.getProperty("user.home")'. This will be different
for each user on shared installs, which is exactly what you want. We
recommend to pick a unique product name in case several Eclipse-based
products using this mechanism are installed on the same machine. This is
consistent with the way Windows apps save their data (just peek in c:
\documents and settings\<user-name>\Application Data\. If you use native
installer to install/uninstall the application, use a consistent naming
convention so that you can clean up this data when uninstalling.

Regards,

Dejan Glozic, Ph.D.
Manager, Eclipse Platform Components
D2/MY7/8200/MKM
IBM Canada Ltd.
Tel. 905 413-2745  T/L 969-2745
Fax. 905 413-4854