as I prefer a clean fresh installation for each minor KNIME version (2.10 to 2.11 for example), I would love to have a possibility to export the installed plugins from my old knime, to be able to import it into the new KNIME. Eclipse provides such a mechanism (Export/Import installed software).
Is it possible to enable it for KNIME?
It would simply save time as I would not have to figure out which plugins I had installed and install them one by one again...
We can see which wizard we need to enable for this (I haven't found it yet). Also the problem with this im/export mechanism is that it writes the exact version numbers of all installed items including the update site addresses. Therefore if you forget to check "Install latest versions" it will try to install the old version or even fail with strange error messages about wrong version numbers.
I usually use the p2 director application and a simple shell script to install a fresh version with all necessary extensions.
Mainly for convenience (i.e. laziness!), but also for me thinking about deployment to users who may or may not have an existing workspace.
Actually, this has only been a problem with the SDK, where I seem to need to generate a fresh workspace each time I update.
We more or less use this method for our test server to install a 'clean' copy of KNIME. I imagine installing the SDK via this route is also possible? If it is could you offer any pointers as to how to do that?
As I said the preferences are part of the workspace so even if they are part of the installation they have to be applied to the workspace somehow. This can only be done by importing them into the workspace and I don't know any headless command to do this.
Of course you can also install an SDK via the exact same mechanism. Here is an example command line:
BTW, we now recommend to use a target platform in a plain Eclipse SDK instead of installing KNIME into an Eclipse SDK. See http://tech.knime.org/developers for details.