On the "pit" of Eclipse Dropins plug-in installation

Every time an Eclipse upgrade is updated, it's a bit of a re-install of some common plugins. To avoid Online Eclipse Updae site every time, Eclipse introduces two different ways: 1. Local Eclipse Update site 2. Drop-ins. Many plug-in download addresses are provided in the form of offline-update-size.zip, and then use the local update, you can easily install plug-ins, which is not particularly good for your network situation is a very good choice.
But here I mainly want to focus on dropins, because I think a lot of use it to load plug-ins There are many misunderstandings, and these misunderstandings will let you appear a lot of inexplicable problems. For example, yesterday I toss a few plug-in Drop-ins installation, encountered the following several problems:
1. If the Supclipse plugin is loaded, the offline package downloaded from the Internet is subclipse-1.10.6.zip and then decompressed into the dropins. Then restart Eclipse, You may find that there is no problem. The plugin is loaded properly. If the problem is so simple, there is no need to write this essay.
2. Subsequent installation of the plugin color-theme in this way, JD and other plugins. Restart eclipse at this time and find that all plugins are not good to use including the previous subclipse. When you open the error view, you can get a lot of errors loading the plugin. Of course, there is a lot of information on the Internet that can be clean at the start of Eclipse or modify Config.ini, etc. This sometimes may not be a problem for some plugins to load, but this does not solve all problems. For example, if you change the name of the Dropins subdirectory, such as changing the subclipse to uppercase or adding, remove a subdirectory, there will be one or the other, and the result is not all the plug-ins under Dropins can load properly, such as Subclipse plug-in is not a problem, but the Color-theme plugin has a problem, this time you will be very headache.
So it's worth talking about here. Dropins Loading plug-ins to be aware of, refer to from: https://wiki.eclipse.org/Stardust/Knowledge_Base/Getting_Started/Installation , here I post a paragraph:
Install features as Drop-ins-this is a good choice if you:
-Know what is doing
-is sure the right Eclipse version with all required dependencies installed
-Is familiar enough with the Eclipse plug-in mechanism and know what to install missing dependencies if needed
-rather perform some steps in the file system than walk through the dialogs of the (local) Eclipse update site Installati On
-Want to separate the new features from your Eclipse installation on file system level
-Want to automate the installation for multiple environments probably means that if you load the plugin this way using Dropins,
1. Be aware of compatibility issues with the Eclipse version. An obvious example here is m2e.m2e 1.5.0 requires Eclipse Luna. It won't work with Kepler or Indigo. See also: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24479109/ Maven-for-eclipse-1-5-0-plugin-cannot-be-installed-under-kepler
2. You need to be very familiar with Eclipse's plug-in mechanism and know how to install all the dependencies required (because Eclipse plugin installation relies on many other libraries)
3. In contrast to the local Eclipse update site installation's graphical interface dialog, you need to do some processing on the file system ...
......
From the above view, is not any one directly take an offline plug-in package extract to the Dropins directory on the line, here is related to version compatibility, dependency, extra processing a lot of things. Here is another example, see: Https://developer.jboss.org/thread /149349?tstart=0, here's an explanation that I feel very well, namely "We no longer provide a" runnable "zip of all of the JBoss Tools for install-by-unzip into D Ropins, because installation that's Error-prone (particularly on Windows) and doesn ' t bring in Third-party Dependenci Es like Birt, maven, or SVN ", it is obvious from here that not a simple zip package is unpacked and placed in the Dropins directory to handle all problems.
Through the above, come to a conclusion is: Install Zip plug-in with Dropins is not so simple, so to follow a what principle?
1. View the downloaded Zip package, if it is similar to Update-site zip package, actually this is an offline update package, the correct installation usage should be with Eclipse Local Update site installation.-> This package should not be put into the dropins, even if there is a chance to succeed, but it is a non-conventional method.
2. Although some of the ZIP package name is similar to Update-site package, but its decompression only features and plugins two subdirectories without additional things, such a package is actually a lot of direct decompression put into the Dropins directory to load.
3. Check the contents of the ZIP package, if it contains files such as Content.jar/artifacts.jar/site.xml, you must use the local update site installtion. Because this is a plugin update package that is specifically used for local update installations, will be loaded with additional dependencies.
Reference: Http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5482554/how-to-install-plugin-for-eclipse-from-zip

Finally, the appendix several m2e each version of the plug-in Update-site.zip package (everyone understands that the online installation m2e is very painful), these packages are my one in https://www.eclipse.org/m2e/m2e-downloads.html, Go to all versions of the directory (Show directory Contents) To download all the contents of the zip and then integrate them all together. Spit out the m2e plugin download, do not give the zip download, only let you see the zip inside the things .... Of course, I recommend that you use Eclipse 4.4,luna, which has built-in m2e, and its plug-in version is a relatively new 1.5.0.20140606-0033.
So I ask the last question, how is this m2e offline update package installed? Haha, of course, using the local update site installtion, do not use Dropins, will not load, because a lot of dependency problem can not solve!
M2E each version Update-site.zip package network download address: Http://pan.baidu.com/s/1qW0onvu