It may be very practical to install Eclipse extensions anywhere on your hard disk and not necessarily in the Eclipse installation folder.
To do this, create a folder named for example
eclipse-addons.
Put there in other folders your plug-ins and create inside every plug-in folder a directory named eclipse. For example:
~/eclipse-addons/myplugin/eclipse
Assure that Eclipse is closes and then go to your Eclipse directory and create a folder named
links.
Create there a file with the extension .link for each of your plug-ins and write in this file just the following line:
path=~/eclipse-addons/myplugin
You've done, now can you start eclipse and the plug-ins are installed.