The script, which has been written several years ago and hosted on this site, is now on GitHub.
At the time of this writing Eclipse was relatively new and as a new platform was lacking some important features that were left to plugin writers. Many Eclipse users were waiting anxiously for a new Eclipse build or a new version of a popular Eclipse plugin.
However, after a new version arrived, update was not very straightforward, as there were too many rules to follow and Eclipse documentation was not as good as it is now. Plugins usually were downloaded and installed manually, and plugin writers were using different conventions to package their plugins. Occasionally a new version was incompatible with the old one in such a way that update could make your workspace unusable. The script addressed all these issues and was easily customizable; sometimes you just need a command line tool.
It is difficult to say for sure how widely this script has been used. At the time Apache Ant was relatively new and used as a build tool, a replacement for the UNIX make utility. Some indications of the script usage could be emails from the users with questions, feature requests, suggestions, and code contributions. The script was reviewed in several blogs and newsgroups, and googling at the time for "Ant script" produced results with this script having the highest rank.
The following text has been written several years ago, at the same time as the script; and even if some statements might look slightly dated, I have decided to leave the original text intact to preserve the spirit of the time:
Eclipse is a great IDE. It is relatively new and the speed with which Eclipse team introduces new features is amazing. However, my first update to a new Eclipse build was rather time consuming; and from reading news I realized that other developers were struggling with updates too. The script simplified updates and, over time, evolved to incorporate some other related activities. All the documentation is in the Readme file. One chapter in the Readme file, named What is the Right Way to Update?, is different from the other chapters as this chapter is not about how to use the script but rather why and when to use it.
You can download a zip file from this site or just browse Readme file online. Latest changes are in Release Notes. It is worth noting that Eclipse comes with the Update Manager but it seems to be for major releases and not for builds. The primary audience for this script is developers who update Eclipse quite often.
Read what others think:
http://youarenumber6.blogspot.com/2004/08/departmental-eclipse-with-ant.html
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