IDEA Plugin - Non-standard config path, no way to install

Sascha Weinreuter · Post by **Sascha Weinreuter** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 1:47 pm

The latest Yourkit EAP seems to require IDEA to be installed in the default location (~/.IntelliJIdea50/config). This is utterly inconvenient because there are a number of reasons for not doing this.

I assume this has been done to be able to install the plugin in the "user-space", but enforcing an installation with default paths is not really realistic. Please provide a way to specify the actual installation/config path again.

Sascha

Post by **Vladimir Kondratyev** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 2:14 pm

This is utterly inconvenient because there are a number of reasons for not doing this.

What are the reasons? Majority of people don't tweak BAT files to change default IDEA's plugin directory. Moreover most of the people even don't know where plugins are located on disks.

Post by **Anton Katilin** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 2:21 pm

Hello,

As a workaround, you can run the wizard that will install the plugin into the standard place, and then move the .jar to your alternate location.

Best regards,
Anton

Sascha Weinreuter · Post by **Sascha Weinreuter** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 3:04 pm

Vladimir Kondratyev wrote:
This is utterly inconvenient because there are a number of reasons for not doing this.
What are the reasons? Majority of people don't tweak BAT files to change default IDEA's plugin directory. Moreover most of the people even don't know where plugins are located on disks.

- I want to have everything (installation + config) under one directory, not scattered around in the user profile.

- The default installation puts the system directory in the home folder as well. That's lots of fun if you have a server-side user profile and hundreds of megabytes are synchronized during logon/logoff. The configuration, though smaller, just doesn't have to be synched as well.

- Because I can. Sounds stupid, but there is a possibility to change those direcories in IDEA, so it's reasonable to expect that 3rd party applications can deal with that. Especially because I can choose a path for all other IDEs.

Well, it's your decision, but by definition, the majority of people is not all people. You will probably leave people out in the cold with this issue and I can imagine that if someone fails to even install YourKit, it won't leave a good impression.

Let the user choose:

(x) Default Installation
( ) Choose installation path: [_______________][...]

Anton Katilin wrote:As a workaround, you can run the wizard that will install the plugin into the standard place, and then move the .jar to your alternate location.

I would, but it tells me that I don't have IDEA installed properly and doesn't install anything. I tried to create the ~/.IntelliJIdea50/config/plugins manually, but then it tells me that it can't uninstall the old plugin. AFAIK the jar isn't everything. Doesn't the wizard install/patch some config files as well?

Sascha

Post by **Anton Katilin** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 3:31 pm

I tried to create file the ~/.IntelliJIdea50/config/plugins manually, but then it tells me that it can't uninstall the old plugin

The approach should actually work...
What is the exact message?

AFAIK the jar isn't everything. Doesn't the wizard install/patch some config files as well?

In case of IDEA, it also creates file ~/.yjp/ide-integration.config with e.g. the following contents:

Code: Select all

#YourKit Java Profiler 4.5 EAP build 641 IDE integration configuration
#Wed Aug 24 18:13:22 MSD 2005
profiler-executable=C\:\\work\\yjp-4.5-eap-build641\\bin\\yjp.exe
agent-lib-dir=C\:\\work\\yjp-4.5-eap-build641\\bin\\win32
ide-name=IntelliJ IDEA 4.5 or higher

Sascha Weinreuter · Post by **Sascha Weinreuter** » Wed Aug 24, 2005 3:48 pm

Thanks, the reason for the error is probably that I already have the ~/.yjp/ide-integration.config file, with the ide-installation-dir property pointing to my IDEA 5.0.1 installation that doesn't have the plugin installed yet. Also, the properties profiler-executable and agent-lib-dir were pointing to an earlier YourKit installation (634) that's no longer present.

So I tried copying the plugin jar directly from YourKit's installation directory to IDEA's plugin dir which finally worked.

Also, after fixing the paths in ~/.yjp/ide-integration.config the integration from within YourKit works as well. I can't remember the exact error message I got earlier, but it said that it could not uninstall the old plugin.

Sascha

sereda · Post by **sereda** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 12:13 pm

YJP build 640, Idea 4.5.4. (I also have Idea 5 installed.) Win XP SP1, default jdk 1.4.2.

Hi,

I had a similar problem. When asked to integrate with Idea, YJP had placed yourkit-for-idea.jar into ~\.IntelliJIdea\config\plugins. When I run Idea, I see that it does not read this folder, so the plug-in is not installed. Maybe this is Idea 5's folder.

Copying the plug-in to system plug-in folder helps, of course.

Regards,
Igor

Post by **Anton Katilin** » Fri Aug 26, 2005 7:14 am

Hi,

When asked to integrate with Idea, YJP had placed yourkit-for-idea.jar into ~\.IntelliJIdea\config\plugins. When I run Idea, I see that it does not read this folder, so the plug-in is not installed. Maybe this is Idea 5's folder.

~\.IntelliJIdea\config\plugins is IDEA 4.5 folder. ~\.IntelliJIdea50\config\plugins is IDEA 5 folder. The wizard places plugin jar to each of them, if both exist. So if you had IDEA 4.5 or 5.0 or both properly installed, plugin should had been installed properly.

Best regards,
Anton

Sascha Weinreuter · Post by **Sascha Weinreuter** » Mon Aug 29, 2005 10:20 am

Just for the record, I'm also not happy with the removed ability to specify the locations for config & caches in the IDEA 5.0 installer. This may indeed make it seem reasonable for YourKit to assume default-locations, but please reconsider if you want to trade the usability for non-standard cases (which DO exist) for a slight and unimportant UI "improvement" (the removed input field). What are you afraid to lose by allowing to enter a path, like it used to be?

If you don't want to add radio buttons for choosing between a standard and a customized installation, you could instead just add another sentence that tells the user to leave the input field empty to use the standard locations.

Regards,
Sascha

Post by **Anton Katilin** » Wed Aug 31, 2005 2:26 pm

Hi,

The main reason to avoid options is that, unfortunately, less experienced users, being offered to choose something manually, very often choose wrong variant, get confused, claim that the program doesn't work etc.

The decision to change the way to install IDEA plugins was caused not by desire to remove a field of course

Instead, there were many people who wanted to install the plugins into user home.

So, if you had an ability to explicitly specify some way the full path to the directory where plugins reside, would it be OK for you?

Best regards,
Anton

Sascha Weinreuter · Post by **Sascha Weinreuter** » Wed Aug 31, 2005 3:42 pm

So, if you had an ability to explicitly specify some way the full path to the directory where plugins reside, would it be OK for you?

That's actually all I'm asking for

Sorry if I came across a bit harsh earlier, but I feel this is a case of "premature optimization": YJP is not an off-the-shelf desktop app that is gonna be used by Joe Average, but an advanced development tool which should make it possible to assume that its users have a basic idea of what to enter where (if there's a good and self-explaining user interface, which YJP undoubtedly has). Well, I know, customers don't always behave like they should, but anyway

If the IDEA-plugin had been the only one that required to enter a path, things would be different, but actually it's now the only one that tries to do some magic in determining the location where to install to, which might be confusing as well.

I am aware that the change was made to be able to install the plugin into the "user-space", which would require to select a totally different path now than just the application's home dir. However, with some explaining words and the option to leave the path blank to use the standard-locations, it should be a win-win situation for everybody.

Cheers,
Sascha

RangerRob · Post by **RangerRob** » Wed Aug 31, 2005 10:34 pm

Sascha, I hope you don't mind me asking (my apologies for going off topic with this Anton!!) but I was just wondering how you have managed to configure an alternate configuration directory with IDEA 5?

I'm probably just missing it but there used to be an option to store your configuration in the IDEA program directory and I always chose this option, however it seems to be missing from the installation GUI and it automatically sets up the user specific ~/.IntelliJIdea50/ path which I'd rather not have.

Sascha Weinreuter · Post by **Sascha Weinreuter** » Thu Sep 01, 2005 8:42 am

Sascha, I hope you don't mind me asking

Not at all. You can change the directories by editing IDEA_HOME/bin/idea.properties. There you can adjust all three different directories for system, config and plugins along with various other settings. I have set them to ../system, ../config and ../config/plugins to have everything under the application home folder.

It's also useful to put this file into your home-directory ${user.home} which will then be loaded instead of the one in the bin folder. With the relative paths this makes it possible to have different installations and updates without having to edit the file each time.

Sascha

RangerRob · Post by **RangerRob** » Thu Sep 01, 2005 9:51 am

That's great thanks Sascha, I've managed to get it working. It's much better for me like that since I use a laptop and have different logins depending upon where I'm working, as you can imagine it was a pain always copying my plugins etc into every profile!!

Post by **Vladimir Kondratyev** » Thu Sep 01, 2005 9:58 am

Options are EVIL!!!