Before this question is blocked for duplication, I would like to mention is that this is an extension of a previous question here: Downloading Eclipse's Source Code
Here's what I need: I am working on a research project on evolution of open-source projects over time. I am concentrating on major releases of Eclipse (such as 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, etc.). Hence I need source code for Eclipse IDE (and IDE only) for specific versions that I have in mind (for e.g. releases with some time gap between them, etc.) (and not all major/minor versions).
The accepted answer for the above mentioned question states that I can download the whole ~7 GB file and pick and choose specific versions. Instead, is there a way that I can download source for Eclipse IDE for specific versions? For e.g. Apache maintains an a zip file per release for every project: http://archive.apache.org/dist/
I added the repository mentioned in the above question and as the questioner states, I too got confused by the number of different modules that I can't understand which ones to download (that correspond to IDE).
Note: I stumbled upon this page for Eclipse builds: http://archive.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/index.php. Can I get source for IDE (and only IDE) from this page for specific versions?
The Eclipse SDK ships with Source bundles. These bundles contain the source code used for that version, but you can't really build them to get the IDE. These are shipped so that developers can see / use the source while they're developing their own application.
Depending on what you're trying to do in your research project, these bundles might be enough. For example, if you want to do some analysis techniques or code metrics, you can probably just use these. You can download old SDKs from the archive server.
If this is not enough, and you need to re-create the exact source code that was used for each release, you'll need to clone the Git repositories and checkout the tag associated with Each release. This is going to be complicated since there are about 22 different source repos for the IDE alone. Here is a link to the list of repos.