Prevent Eclipse plugin installation on Windows XP/7

I am in the process of upgrading our development environment at work. One of the features is to get our developers using Eclipse as their IDE. However for security reasons we do not want our developers to be able to install plugins in Eclipse.

Is there a way to install Eclipse such that a regular user will need to obtain admin privileges to install a plugin?

Regrettably I am only familiar with *nix type permissions, and I would have thought windows would be somewhat similar. I believe I have installed Eclipse under C:\Program Files\eclipse with just read/execute permissions, but when a regular user comes along and tries to install a plugin it appears that Eclipse installs it under the user's directory. Is there a way to开发者_开发知识库 prevent that?

Basically after the initial installation of Eclipse the developer should NOT be able to install plugins. What's the best way to do this?

Ultimately this will need to work on a WinXP system. But for my home computer I test on a Win7 machine. Hopefully the procedure for the two platforms are the same, but when it comes to MS who knows.

There is no obvious way to prevent plug-in installation on eclipse. Even the eclipse installed under C:\Program Files\ on windows 7, eclipse also allows installing the plug-ins into the user's home directory for each user. It's designed for share install that has same behavior on linux as well.

I'm not sure what's kind of security concerns to make such a decision, one possible way is removing the org.eclipse.equinox.p2.ui.* plug-ins from your eclipse to disable the ui entry of eclipse's install menu.

FYI: the full description of the behaviour you are seeing is described in multi-user installs [1]. If you check out that and the Runtime options available as a link from that page, maybe you can set the osgi.configuration.area system property to something read-only as well.

[1] http://help.eclipse.org/helios/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/reference/misc/multi_user_installs.html