Eclipse - difference between these installation methods?

Question

I am wanting to install eclipse for study/school purposes. I am after "Eclipse for Java".

On the eclipse website, there seems to be two ways to achieve this:

(a) Use the eclipse installer (where you choose which eclipse you want to download and it does it for you)

(b) go the the 'dowload packages' page, download a zip file e.g. "java-neon-64-windows.zip" and then unextract the zip

I tried both of these methods. However, the resulting eclipse folders from both these installations is of different sizes.

Method (A) installation was 20.7MB

Method (B) installation was 192MB

Please clarify what causes this huge difference and which one of these should I use for my purpose??

Thanks

Answer 1

Eclipse installer stores the Eclipse plugins on a different location than your Eclipse product's directory tree. This allows installer to create multiple Eclipse products without downloading all the plugins again. You can probably find the plugin pool under ~.p2/pool.