When you have lots of developers needing a homogeneous set of Eclipse plugins, it makes sense to provide a local mirror of the necessary update sites for easy provisioning. I have written a simple shell script for this which I put in crontab for periodic execution:

#!/bin/sh
ECLIPSE_HOME=/opt/eclipse
REPO_HOME=/var/www/p2repo
JAVA_OPTS=”-Dhttp.proxyHost=proxy.acme.com -Dhttp.proxyPort=3128″
UPDATE_SITES=”http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/development/ http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x/ http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e-extras http://directory.apache.org/studio/update/1.x/ http://eclipse.jcraft.com/ http://java.decompiler.free.fr/jd-eclipse/update”
for i in $UPDATE_SITES; do
echo $i
java $JAVA_OPTS -jar $ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_*.jar -application org.eclipse.update.core.standaloneUpdate -command mirror -from $i -to $REPO_HOME
done