A big change in Eclipse P2

One of the problems that have been haunting me since I started work at Red Hat, were changes made to the master configuration. Yes, when you install Eclipse using yum, Eclipse is readonly, and all the configuration changes are stored in your local ~/.eclipse folder.

So, if any change was made to the master installation, equinox was dropping user installed bundles (in majority of cases), but P2 was totally unaware of that change.

In other words - if you installed any feature, it was lost, and you could not reinstall it, because P2 still thought it was installed.

I can't say I was totally unaware of changes happening in P2 regarding those problems, but when I prepared a package of latest Kepler release, I got a dialog:

P2 new feature

Here is the explanation of what happened:
P2 stored a timestamps of important config files during first Kepler launch.
yum changed the installation and touched files
P2 discovered the change and dropped all plugins installed by a user into user space
P2 located previously installed bundles and offered reinstalling them.

I'm sure all devops will appreciate that feature!