Locations
The Eclipse runtime defines a number of locations which give
plug-in developers context for reading/storing data and Eclipse users
a control over the scope of data sharing and visibility. Eclipse
defines the following notions of location:
User (-user) {osgi.user.area} [@none, @noDefault, @user.home,
@user.dir, filepath, url]
User locations are specific to, go figure,
users. Typically the user location is based on the value of the Java
user.home system property but this can be overridden. Information such
as user scoped preferences and login information may be found in the
user location.
Install (-install) {osgi.install.area} [@user.home,
@user.dir, filepath, url]
An install location is where Eclipse itself
is installed. In practice this location is the directory (typically
“eclipse”) which is the parent of the eclipse.exe being run or the
plugins directory containing the org.eclipse.equinox.launcher bundle.
This location should be considered read-only to normal users as an
install may be shared by many users. It is possible to set the install
location and decouple eclipse.exe from the rest of Eclipse.
Configuration (-configuration) {osgi.configuration.area} [@none,
@noDefault, @user.home, @user.dir, filepath, url]
Configuration
locations contain files which identify and manage the (sub)set of an
install to run. As such, there may be many configurations per install.
Installs may come with a default configuration area but typical
startup scenarios involve the runtime attempting to find a more
writable configuration location.
Instance (-data) {osgi.instance.area}
[@none, @noDefault, @user.home, @user.dir, filepath, url]
Instance
locations contain user-defined data artifacts. For example, the
Resources plug-in uses the instance area as the workspace location and
thus the default home for projects. Other plugins are free to write
whatever files they like in this location.
While users can set any of
these locations, Eclipse will compute reasonable defaults if values
are not given. The most common usecase for setting location is the
instance area or, in the IDE context, the workspace. To run the
default Eclipse configuration on a specific data set you can specify:
06001