Reverting Changes in an Eclipse Installation using p2

I was helping a colleague with some Eclipse install issues and was surprised he didn’t know about the ability to revert to a previous install configuration. Equinox p2 makes the revert process sane compared to the old Eclipse Update story. So everyone knows, to revert to a previous configuration of an Eclipse install, this is what you do…

First, open the About dialog and click the Installation Details button:

From the list, you can select a previous configuration and click the Revert button to go back in time:

It’s that simple!

As a bonus in Eclipse 3.6, you’ll be able to compare two configurations to see differences via the Compare button:

Once you do that, you should see a compare dialog with the changes:

Hope this helps!