Comment 112 for bug 123064

And what when a third-party plugin wants to upgrade the JDT? or a similar core plugin that an Eclipse package would need to provide in order to make Eclipse usable out of the box?

Eclipse's plugin manager can only "handle itself" correctly on a single-user system, unless you start making system directories world-writable...

Perhaps the answer is to modify /usr/bin/eclipse so that it copies a skeleton of all the packaged plugins into the user's home directory the first time it is run, and always use those instead. This way the problems of file permissions and plugins affecting other user's accounts are avoided.

@Rockwalrus:
Are you still actively working on the Eclipse package in the PPA? I'd be happy to try this theory out, if it is worthwhile?