[eclipse-dev] Tweaking Eclipse installs

[Jeff McAffer <Jeff_McAffer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

There seems to be some confusion in
this area.  Some clarification (I hope)...

Previously (i.e., 2.1) one could go
and manually tweak previously installed plugins and then rerun Eclipse
and have the changes be picked up.  As you can imagine, having the
runtime scan the file system to find these changes is quite expensive.
 Further, this kind of tweaking is very rare.  It is rare in
development scenarios and non-existant in product scenarios.  Several
weeks ago the runtime eliminated these checks from the normal startup sequence
and put in place several options for running Eclipse and detecting changes.
 

The following reenable checking for changes to the plugin.xml or manifest.mf
files:

osgi.checkConfiguration=true  
(System property)
        If this
property is set to true, the runtime will check for changes to the plugin.xml
and 
        manifest.mf
files for the installed plugins.  This can be set either on the command

        line using
-Dosgi.checkConfiguration=true as VM arg or putting that property 
        setting
in the config.ini file)

-dev
        as a command
line program arg. Automatically sets osgi.checkConfiguration to true

If you have done more extensive tweaks
to your installed plugins (e.g., adding/renaming packages) then a more
extensive rework of the runtime's information is required and you should
specify one of

osgi.clean=true   (System property)
        If this
property is set to true, the runtime will recompute/reanalyze the plugins

        installed
and update its internal information.  This can be set either on the
command 
        line using
-Dosgi.clean=true as VM arg or putting that property 
        setting
in the config.ini file)
-clean
        as a command
line program arg. Automatically sets osgi.clean to true

Jeff