Question

What is the difference between these things from an Eclipse installation?

• plugins
• features
• dropins folder

What is the correct use of these folders?

Answer 1

I usually use dropins for sharing plugins amongst multiple Eclipse installations.
See this article for the dropins directory within an Eclipse.

you can use some different structures to place the plug-ins into the Dropins folder – I prefer to separate them by domain:

/dropins/exampleA/plugins/…
/dropins/exampleB/plugins/…
/dropins/exampleC/eclipse/features/…
/dropins/exampleC/eclipse/plugins/…

But I prefer to reference an external dropins folder through the eclipse.ini.

-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.p2.reconciler.dropins.directory=C:/jv/eclipse/mydropins

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The plugins/features directories in Eclipse are the default installation directories for plugin.
For more on the differences between features and plugins, see my SO answer:

• you will copy features (declaration of a group of plugins) in the features directory
• you will copy the actual plugins themselves in the plugins directory.

Within a dropin folder (either the one within eclipse or an external one), you will get back the same plugins/feature structure.