Maintaining multiple version of a software

Describes the process of maintaining multiple version of Eclipse on your linux machine

I’ve needed on a couple occasions to use a software with different version numbers.

On Ubuntu, the solution is pretty easy: update-alternatives

Let’s look at how we can keep multiple versions of eclipse on the system.

Download, and unpack eclipse in the opt folder, we have version 4.2.2

update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/eclipse eclipse /opt/eclipse/eclipse-SDK-4.2.2/eclipse 50

After this we can see that this command creates a symlink to the eclipse program, this way we can add multiple version of the program and switch really easy. This is applicable to all the application that run on Ubuntu.

Or you can even link the entire directory

update-alternatives --install /opt/eclipse eclipse /opt/.versions/eclipse/eclipse-SDK-4.2.2 500