Eclipse: Best practices for avoiding conflicting dependencies?

Question

I use Eclipse for many different types of projects (web, desktop, Android, different languages) so I use many different features and plug-ins. But I often end up in a tangle of 'conflicting dependency' errors like this, and usually resort to uninstalling everything and restarting with just the ones I need for my task for the day.

This makes switching projects tedious and time-consuming, so I've been trying to reduce conflicts. I've found the following practices to be helpful, but suboptimal:

• installing features piecemeal (downside: time-consuming)
• not updating (Help → Check for Updates) unless absolutely necessary (downside: not having the latest and greatest features, including some that other developers expect me to have)
• reducing the number of software sites I use (downside: some features are only available on third-party sites, and it's often unclear which versions are for Eclipse 3.8—some devs call my Eclipse Indigo, and others Juno)

Conflicts nevertheless seem inevitable, and Eclipsers are apparently confused about the best way to handle them. Forums claim to have resolutions for specific conflicts, but I always seem to be stuck with an odd duck. It seems the details of conflict messages are poorly understood; this blog post, for example, claims most of the parts of the messages are 'misleading' and to 'be ignored as noise', and describes the odds of fixing conflicts as 'slight'.

But surely the Eclipse community hasn't settled for this! Surely I'm missing something, and there's a solution for this, and I just need to be better at web searching, or RTFM. Surely Hopefully the StackOverflow universe can forgive me for this, and offer me some advice about:

• Understanding details of error messages—how can I find out which feature needs, say, org.eclipse.rse.subsystems.files.ssh 2.1.300.201205062159 and which needs org.eclipse.rse.subsystems.files.ssh 2.1.300.201209191030? Is there an easy way to map component names to plug-ins and features?

• How to fix them—might there be a magic update path that'll give me what I want, or a single problematic plug-in that I can get rid of to make everything else work smoothly?

• What can I do to make conflicts less likely, in addition to what I listed above?

Answer 1

This isn't exactly a solution to the problem, but rather a way to prevent it:

Use different eclipse installations for different types of projects

Eclipse allows you to simply download a zip file, unzip, and off you go. I recommend that for each type of project that requires a different set of plugins, you have a different eclipse installation. In each installation, you install just the plugins you need and nothing else.

It sounds sub optimal, but its the approach I've taken to prevent bloating my eclipse installations with many useful plugins that I don't need at all times.