Advantures in Eclipse - Yoxos

Yoxos
Once again, I was looking to update my Eclipse installation and I remembered Yoxos. It's a really great service and it turns out it's been greatly improved since the last time I looked. The list of plugins is much larger and it is not littered with trial and shareware versions. Everything shown seems to be the open source stuff that you'd want to have. There may be a few pay-for packages, but I haven't run into them yet.

You can also create "profiles" which are groups of features. Then you can create a download list by selecting either features individually or with profiles (yours or created by others). Downloading this list creates a single archive (.tar.gz) that contains a fully configured eclipse directory. Just unpack and use.

One problem though appears to be that you can't remove individual features from the eclipse installation created in this way. The standard eclipse update facility is installed but the Uninstall button seems to be disabled on everything but the "Eclipse Platform" feature. One can download additional features from Yoxos from inside Eclipse. But they too cannot be uninstalled. The only way to undo changes is by reverting the entire configuration. So you can back up a step but you can't remove things out of order. This lack of Uninstall support is strange. I can only assume that it is required for Yoxos to do its magic. But it is not explained anywhere that I've seen.

There seems to be a few new features that I haven't tried yet. You can publish your workspace configuration, team project sets, mylyn queries, and other things. This allows sharing your setup between multiple computers - something that I constantly need to do between my work desktop and laptop.

All in all - Yoxos is a wonderful service for eclipse users. I highly recommend it. In fact, I'd say never download Eclipse from the main site any more. Yoxos is the way!

Or, just use the Yoxos update site in a stock Eclipse. For example, enter the following as an update site:
http://update1.yoxos.com/dist/3.4.1.081002/site.xml