One of the things about open source projects like Eclipse is their fast development cycle. When you download and install a stable release you are already behind because of the activity taking place on the nightly builds. I usually install the stable release on my machines but when a new version is released, I spend way too much trying to configure things again.

Eclipse 3.1 has been released to the public which means that I will be upgrading at least one of my machines to document the experience. However, this time around I might change some things around to facilitate any future upgrades to my Eclipse installation and the management of the plugins I commonly use. What am I changing? well, I found an article posted to Java Lobby with information about how to manage multiple Eclipse installations. The article also points to a couple of blogs for more information on the same topic. The discussion forum also provides some links to other user’s commentary.

I’ve read that some plugins have not been updated to work with Eclipse 3.1 so I will spend some time reading over the article and research a little more about how other developers setup their Eclipse installation(s), while development on the plugins is complete for the new version.