Eclipse's Quirkiness

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.