Eclipse and Roaming Profiles

How to setup the eclipse development platform to work with a Roaming Profile with Folder Redirects.

Eclipse is a great tool but in Windows by default it sets up a folder in your User folder called .eclipse to hold user specific data like plugins etc. This does not work well if you are using folder redirection for your User folder to a network share: the lag is too much and the program hangs a lot.

To change this behaviour you can use a switch on the command line:

1. Navigate to eclipse.exe in Windows Explorer (e.g. C:\Program Files\Eclipse), right click and use Create Shortcut on the content menu.
2. Select the shortcut and edit its Properties. In the Target field append the command line argument –configuration e.g.:
   eclipse.exe –configuration “K:\Users\[username]\.eclipse\[platform]\configuration”
   Ensure the “Start In” is set to the eclipse location e.g. “C:\Program Files\Eclipse\”

Note however I found this didn’t work when selecting ‘restart’ from the File menu from within the program it just reverted to the default setting, so instead I altered the configuration file at: C:\Program Files\Eclipse\configutaion\config.ini and added the line:
osgi.configuration.area=F:\Users/[username]/.eclipse/org.eclipse.platform_[platform number]/configuration
However, this has a few downsides:

• It is user specific i.e. if there is more than one user on the machine.
• It will need updating with the platform number on the next eclipse release.

So in truth I haven’t found the answer to this one yet. Anyone who has please leave a comment. For now I’m just stuck with the lag.

References:
Eclipse multi-user installs