From my previous post you may already have an inkling what I’m going to say next in regards to the Flex Builder 2 (Beta 1) plugin for eclipse and advanced eclipse configuration setups.
The problem is that the Flex installer insists on installing the plugin to the folders within the eclipse folder structure. Thus making it impossible to disable it if you wish to use another context and keep your base installation ‘3rd party plugin free’.
I personally keep my plugins fairly isolated from each other – where permitted. To avoid unnecessary conflicts that may arise. This way I can easily disable those plugins from within eclipse if I have any issues or if I’m not currently utilizing them on a daily basis. Now I could just fish around and try and move the files in question, but I think I’d rather have the option to install them where I want to in the first place.
The reason you can’t install the plugins into an externalized configuration, (currently), is that the Flex installer checks the folders when asking for an eclipse directory to install into. It then pops up a dialog if you try to coax it into any other directory that it feels isn’t a ‘genuine’ eclipse folder. Flex Builder 2 isn’t the only one though – Omondo UML suffers from exactly the same ‘issue’.
For those who haven’t seen the dialog it enforces the point that the eclipse directory must have a folder called ‘plugins’ and a folder called ‘features’, but it obviously looks for something else as well, otherwise my external directory structure would be sufficient.
Hopefully Adobe will resolve this before the final product is released :)
If you haven’t read the post about external eclipse plugin configurations you can read it here
