Eclipse's Quirkiness

Posted At : August 11, 2008 11:00 AM | Posted By : KnitGal
Related Categories: OS X,CFEclipse,Aptana,Rants

Somehow, I accidentally deleted the Eclipse folder I use most often when I was cleaning out my Eclipse installations. I tried restoring the folder from my Time Machine archive, but no, the wrong one.

Sigh . . . that meant that I would have to reinstall Eclipse. Herein lies my issue with the program - it's a real pita to install. And this time was no exception. Backtracking a bit, I had a bit of a struggle with getting Aptana to install. When I found out that Aptana 1.1.17 beta was available for use with Eclipse 3.4, I went to download it only to run into dependencies issues.

Yes, E3.4 now checks for dependencies on other plugins before it will let you install target plugins. To install Aptana, I had to follow instructions for plugging Aptana into an existing Eclipse configuration.

See the instructions for selecting General > Capabilites and checking the Classic Update box? Yep - you guessed it . . . if you install Eclipse 3.4 right from the download site, you're not going to see that in Preferences. No - it turns out that you also have to install Eclipse SDK, a tidbit which I only found out by searching the other threads at Aptana forums after my question went unanswered by the Aptana staff in the bug tracking system and in the forum. (Shouldn't they add that interesting tidbit on the "plugging Aptana" page? - Ed. Yes, they most definitely should!)

Okay . . . back on track now. After reinstalling Eclipse, then Aptana and CFEclipse, the next step was to install Subversive. Here again I ran into issues. SVN Kit 1.2.0 beta 4 was only available for install for use with OS X. So, I selected that and Subversive from the eclipse install site. Here I ran into yet another problem - the SVN Team Provider (Incubation), version 0.7.1.I20080612-1500 was incombatible with 1.2.0 and the install wouldn't proceed.

So, I had to do some googling and came up with this very helpful blog post. I followed the instructions that Craig Thomas provided in #12 comments. Back on track now. What I don't understand is why the "download.eclipse.org/technology/subversive/0.7/update-site/" isn't automatically refreshed to point to the new version.

Eclipse is nice enough, but it has its quirkiness that makes life miserable for the unsuspecting.

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Rebuilding My Eclipse Environment

Posted At : July 4, 2008 11:18 AM | Posted By : KnitGal
Related Categories: What I Wish I'd Known,CFEclipse

After discovering that tag insight wasn't working for me in CFEclipse 1.3.2beta, I decided to roll back to the latest stable version.

It took several reinstalls of Eclipse Ganymede before I finally got back to how I like it set up. Eclipse is incredibly finicky in that aspect and that's the downside. If you look at plugins and features directories, you'll find tons and tons of files and subdirectories. And sometimes one little file somehow gets messed up and Eclipse has a conniption and refuses to display one of the perspectives properly.

One handy feature that seems to be overlooked is the ability to import and export lists of update sites such as CFEclipse and Aptana. If you look at Software Updates>Manage Software, you'll see that the default lists are set only to Ganymede Sites and a bunch of links pointing to download.eclipse.org. If you anticipate that you might have to trash an eclipse directory (or really, to have a backup list just in case), you should go to Export . . ., tick off the external site links you want to preserve. This will be saved in .xml format; give it a meaningful name such as EclipseBackup.xml or something like that if you think the default Bookmarks.xml name is too generic.

Then, should you need to reinstall Eclipse, you can simply go to Import . . ., navigate to your directory where you saved your .xml list, and select that. And bingo, your external sites are available, saving you minutes of looking for that website url and typing it in.

Next step - importing projects. Easily done. Not so easy to figure out - reconnecting SVN links. After some trial and error, and scouring Polarion's site, I finally figured it out. To save you the trouble, here's how to reconnect projects to SVN repositories:

Select a project, right-click and then select Team>Share Projects . . . Then, select SVN. In the next dialog window you should see the relevant repository location you're trying to reconnect the project to. Below, ""Use project settings"" is selected; you should be fine with this if you didn't delete .svn file from the directory. Then click on Finish; that should be all you need to do.

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