Speed-up Installation of Plugins in Eclipse

Installing plug-ins in Eclipse can in some situations take a long time. This can also affect users of CloverDX Designer if they choose the Online or Offline Eclipse Plugin Installation download type. This blog post describes a workaround for the slow install process.

The reason for the long installation time is that by default Eclipse contacts all available update sites to try to resolve dependencies of the plugin being installed. There can be a large number of update sites, some can be not responding or slow and overall the connection can be bad. To disable contacting of all update sites, uncheck the "Contact all update sites during install to find required software" checkbox in the installation dialog:

This workaround can help not only when installing CloverDX Designer, but also when using Eclipse in general. However, it does have a drawback - some dependencies of the plugin being installed might not be resolved. This can also happen when installing CloverDX Designer, because it depends on the GEF and RSE plugins. The plugins are found in the main Eclipse update site which would not be contacted when using the described workaround. Eclipse will detect that some dependencies of CloverDX Designer are not met and will not proceed with the installation:

In case some dependencies are not resolved, there are 2 options:

• Find and install the dependencies manually (in case of GEF and RSE they can be found in the main Eclipse update site)
• Accept the long installation time and enable the checkbox back. Eclipse will resolve the dependencies automatically

Hopefully this hint will help some users of CloverDX Designer or Eclipse with the slow installation. However it's important to understand that it's NOT mandatory to use the workaround as the installation is quick in many cases - use it only in case of issues.