Live builds (development snapshots) are distributed as single archives and must be manually installed. The archive can be extracted directly on top of an existing Eclipse installation, but we recommend to install it elsewhere and link it with the platform at runtime instead.

This can be easily done with the help of a links directory. The platform will read the contents of this directory at startup and make the plugins listed in it available. When the time comes to uninstall the plugins (for example, when the EclipseFP development build achieves release status), only the links directory will need to be removed.

A typical Eclipse installation has the following structure:

eclipse/         (directory for installed Eclipse files)
    ...
    jre/
    features/    (installed features)
        ...
    plugins/
        ...

The links directory must be created inside the eclipse directory, like this:

eclipse/         (directory for installed Eclipse files)
    ...
    jre/
    features/    (installed features)
        ...
    plugins/
        ...
    links/

After creating the directory, we need to create a file inside it to link to where the archive was extracted. The file name must end with the suffix .link and its contents are expected to be in Java properties format. There should be a key named path and its value should be the absolute path to the location where the archive was extracted.

Suppose we have downloaded an EclipseFP live build and extracted the archive to /home/ourhome/eclipsefp. Our link file will be called, say, eclipsefp.link and will contain this:

path=/home/ourhome/eclipsefp

Note: On Windows platforms, remember not to use backslashes, use normal slashes instead.