Eclipse entries under launch group are missing - eclipse

I do C++ embedded development for the NetBurner platform. They have plug-ins that customize Eclipse and in addition to a build tool-chain they add a Launch Group under the Run Configuration area. Everything was working fine under Indigo (32 bit) when I decided to install Subclipse (big mistake). As soon as the install finished I could no longer run my existing configurations successfully. When I went into the Run Configurations area I noticed the Launch Group I used to use was missing. Here is what it looked like earlier yesterday:
Here's what it looks like today:
Things I've tried
First I uninstalled the Subclipse plugins using the
Help->About->Installation Details and then selecting them one at a
time, Uninstalling and restarting after each uninstall. No change.
Then I unpacked the original Eclipse Indigo/CDT 32 bit download to a
fresh folder. Copied over the NetBurner plugins from the zip I got
from the manufacturer. No change.
Launched with different Workspaces, no change.
Launched a Galileo version, it uses older plug-ins, and it still
works.
Copied older plug-ins into Indigo, the older NetBurner launcher
shows up (but it doesn't really work with Indigo)
Removed the older plug-ins put in the newer ones, old NetBurner
launcher went away new launcher does not show up.
Tried removing the
{Workspace}.metadata.plugins\org.eclipse.debug.core.launches - no
change.
Interestingly even though launches has many .launch files that should show up under Run Configuration, nothing shows up.
One other strange (possibly relevant) thing is that icon for the NetBurner Perspective went away, now it just has <NetBurner> as the text and a generic perspective icon.
I can still cross-compile and build for the NetBurner (i.e. the build toolchain still works), it's just the ability to use run configurations that seems to be missing.
I'm out of ideas, does anyone know of some global setting that sits outside the workspace and outside the Indigo installation folder that could be causing this?
I'm running on Win 7 64 bit ultimate, I run the 32 bit version of Indigo because the 64 bit doesn't appear to work with the NetBurner plug-ins. I've also disabled the two Mylyn tasks under General->Startup and Shutdown (they seemed to cause many Permgen memory crashes). This is the same setup I had working flawlessly yesterday.
Update
I also noticed that only 3 of the 4plug-ins are showing up in the Installation Details plug-in pane. The nbeclipse.core_2.6.0.jar is in the eclipse plugin directory but not showing as loaded. So I guess I know now the problem is the plug-in isn't loading but I don't know why or how to get it to load, or what subclipse could have changed that would cause this.

I suspect that the Subclipse installation may have caused an update to some other plugin(s) that it depended on (keep in mind the transitive nature plugin dependency resolution; if you're installing plugin A and it requires a certain version of Plugin B that you don't have, Plugin B will be installed or updated to that version). In doing so, maybe the NetBurner plugin can no longer load because its declared dependencies are no longer met (ie, it depended on an earlier version and does not tolerate a later version).
You can use the OSGi Console to help determine why a plugin is not loading. Here are a couple of references that should help:
http://grep.elasticpath.com/community/techblog/blog/2010/05/27/eclipse-plugins-and-the-osgi-console
http://www.vogella.com/articles/OSGi/article.html#osgiconsole
By the way, you can not just copy plugins into an Eclipse installation and expect them to work. For several versions now, Eclipse has not supported that ability. You must use Help > Install New Software or File > Import > Install > From Existing Installation to install plugins. Ask the vendor if they have an update site to install from; like I said above, simply dropping things into Eclipse's plugins folder is not supported any more, it won't work. Other than the vendor providing an update site, the only other option is to use the dropins folder, as described here.

Related

Bundle 'org.eclipse.core.runtime' cannot be resolved

I recently upgraded from Eclipse Kepler to Luna. A plugin I had been working on is now showing build errors without any source being changed.
Here is an extract from my MANIFEST.MF,
Require-Bundle: org.eclipse.core.runtime;bundle-version="3.7.0",
org.eclipse.ui;bundle-version="3.7.0",
org.eclipse.ui.ide;bundle-version="3.7.0",
org.eclipse.core.resources;bundle-version="3.7.0",
org.eclipse.ui.forms;bundle-version="3.6.0",
org.eclipse.wst.sse.ui;bundle-version="1.3.0",
org.eclipse.jface.text;bundle-version="3.8.100",
org.eclipse.ui.workbench.texteditor;bundle-version="3.8.101",
org.eclipse.ui.views;bundle-version="3.6.0"
None of the core or ui bundles are resolved. I don't think Eclipse could even run without them and their equivalent .jar files are present and readable and haven't been modified as part of the upgrade, so they are not actually missing. When I try to add dependencies on the Dependencies tab the problem bundles do not show.
Eclipse was upgraded by the Arch Linux package manager. I mention it for completeness but believe it is likely identical to any other upgrade mechanism. I also tried creating a new plug-in project but the same happens, I guess this means it's a global setting. I'm relatively new to PDE and so far haven't had a need to change any settings.
From the preference page (Preferences > Plug-in Development > Target Platform), try Removing the Running Platform target definition, Applying, and then Restoring Defaults. Maybe it's just stale and pointing to the jars that it doesn't know Arch has changed about.

Eclipse/RAP/GEF Indigo to Eclipse/RAP/GEF Kepler

I am not an Eclipse/RAP developer, but over a year ago I was tasked with getting a particular application to run. The development environment was Eclipse/RAP using Java. The application was already almost done -- I just needed to make a few changes to get it to work the way we wanted it to work. I made the changes, stuck it into the Jboss app, and it worked. I saved away my source code.
Since then they upgraded my PC, so I no longer have access to my old development environment. We need to move the RAP application to another server, and for some reason it has quit working. Either I don't understand why it ever worked or I don't understand why it doesn't work -- it's all a bit baffling.
So now I'm trying to get this thing working again.
The basic problem I haven't been able to resolve is dependencies. Eclipse reports that the following three bundles can't be found:
org.eclipse.rap.draw2d
org.eclipse.rap.zest.core
org.eclipse.rap.zest.layouts
All three should be in the GEF package.
I have tried installing Eclipse Indigo. When I do that, Eclipse can't find GEF to install it, even though it's given the same URL as I give to Kepler. I've installed Eclipse Kepler. I can install GEF, but while Eclipse reports a valid install, and reports that it is installed, I'm still seeing the same missing dependencies.
Any ideas? It's baffled an Eclipse developer here, but then we don't really use RAP except for this one application.
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.
Sean.
This is a dependency-related issue, and has nothing to do with RAP. Nevertheless, be careful that the notion of GEF has changed a bit. GEF4 includes: GEF, Zest, Draw2D. Rather than installing the whole thing, I suggest you download your dependencies (i.e. go to GIT and pull the GEF4 project), and then include those projects (or build them as JARs) and include them to be available at runtime, and of course as dependencies.

Deleting every eclipse plugin in Galileo

My eclipse runs horribly slow because I have thousands of plugins installed on it. I spoke with another friend who uses eclipse but he has none. I feel like none of these are necessary and I didn't even install so many. I have thousands of plugins and I tried reinstaling eclipse but I need to find a way to remove every single eclipse plugin.
Attempting to delete a plugin manually takes up to 5 minutes per plugin, so it could take me months or years before actually deleting all of these by hand.
Is there a feature in eclipse to delete all the plugins? Also I'm using WINDOWS XP
First, you need to understand that virtually everything in Eclipse is a plugin. Eclipse has a very small core runtime (Equinox) that loads all features from plugins. You can't just "delete every plugin" as doing so would leave you with nothing.
Also, just because a plugin is installed does not mean that it is always loaded or taking up resources. Eclipse uses a "lazy loading" architecture that will only load a plugin when some feature that it provides is actually invoked. Some plugins are probably written poorly in such a way that they are loaded too aggressively, but that would be the rare exception. So, in general, having lots of plugins is not a problem for performance.
If you do have a plugin that you want to remove, you can not just delete it from the plugins folder - as you've seen that will screw up your Eclipse installation. Don't do that.
One way to manage the features that you have installed, including installing ones that are able to be uninstalled, is to open the About dialog, then click the Installation Details button. There you'll be presented with a list of features that have been installed; you can select a feature and if it's possible to uninstall it the Uninstall... button will be enabled.
Often it's one bad third-party plugin/feature (not something from eclipse.org) that causes an Eclipse installation to have problems; try to find what it might be by process of elimination (uninstall all third-party plugins that you might have installed since your Eclipse was fresh).
Finally, as a last resort, it is trivial to remove Eclipse completely (just delete it from your file system) and re-install it fresh.
Having said all that, performance problems are usually due to an underpowered machine. What kind of processort do you have? How much RAM does your system have available after Windows boots up? Have you specified memory settings in eclipse.ini?

Plugins from Different Eclipse Configuration are not Isolated

I'm sorry for a pretty vague title, didn't want to turn it into a paragraph.
So, I am using Eclipse Platform 3.7.1 (the one with absolutely no plugin preinstalled), the latest version so far, and I have discovered that by taking advantage of its -configuration option, I can choose which plugins are running and which are not. It was going well enough until I started installing the plugins.
But allow me to explain my setup first, I am using Ubuntu linux by the way. Using only one eclipse installation, my installation is arranged in the following order:
Installation:
~/bin/opt/eclipse
eclipse (executable binary)
~/bin/eclipse -> opt/eclipse/eclipse
Configurations:
~/.eclipse/configuration
web-php
android
java
Installing JDT and ADT while running eclipse and using the android configuration directory posed no problems. So I moved on to the php configuration and tried to install PDT (the JDT and ADT plugins were not activated here, so far so good). The problems came along after the installation, not only was I not able to use PDT, I noticed in the Installation Details that JDT, ADT, PDT were installed but not activated. Instead, they were all activated in the android configuration. To make it worse, when I chose the Java configuration, I could not even use JDT.
My expectations however were when using:
eclipse -configuration ~/.eclipse/configuration/android
was that only the JDT and ADT were activated and when using:
eclipse -configuration ~/.eclipse/configuration/web-php
only the PDT is activated
Regarding the java configuration however, it's probably another problem altogether but if there was help on how to activate a plugin installed from another configuration, I'd deeply appreciate it.
Also, see Single Eclipse install with multiple Configurations and Workspaces
In a p2 world there are extra steps to isolate bundles from each other. You need not just a different configuration directory, but a different p2 profile.
Have a look at the config.ihi in each of your configurations. There are two ways that Eclipse identifies the plugins to use, the ..updateconfigurator, which simply uses all of the plugins in the plugins folder, and the ..simpleconfigurator which uses the bundles.info file in that's in the org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator folder (which is maintained by the p2 installer). Make sure this file is what you expect.
And also, you might want to start with the -clean option if you are using the updateconfigurator to have it rescan all of the plugins (otherwise it remembers in some hidden cache).
Make sure when you installed everything that you had your -configuration set to the right place for the different things you installed.
I hope some of this points you in the right direction.

How to update Eclipse from 3.4 (Ganymede) to 3.5 (Galileo)?

I've got my Eclipse 3.4 envirnoment set up nice and cozy the way I like it. Took me some time too, to find all the plugins (Mylin, PDT, Subclipse), set all the settings, etc. Now I see that some of the plugins (like PDT) only support 3.5 in their latest versions.
Is it possible to update from 3.4 to 3.5? I'd hate to do it all again.
I read in some mailing list where they noted that it's possible, but the conversation trailed off in another direction. Google wasn't much help, and Eclipse's documentation either.
All of your settings are actually stored as part of your workspace. So you could do a fresh install of the latest version of Eclipse, add the extra plugins that you want (many of which will have newer versions for Eclipse 3.5) and when you launch, just make sure you point to your old workspace.
Help -> Software Updates... -> Available Software tab -> Add Site...
Enter the update site for the Galileo (3.5) release train: http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo
Now go back to the Installed Software tab and click the Update... button.
After some computation you should be presented with a list of available updates (or some cryptic errors about how your current environment cannot be updated due to compatibility issues).
This is what I did.
1.- My workspace was in c:\Users\me\workspace.
I copied this folder to c:\users\me\eclipse\workspace-3.4 and to c:\users\me\eclipse\workspace-3.5
So now I have twice the same, just with different names.
2.- Extracted eclipse-SDK-3.5-win32.zip to C:\program files\eclipse-SDK-3.5-win32
3.- Run Eclipse 3.4 and changed the workspace from c:\Users\me\workspace to c:\users\me\eclipse\workspace-3.4. Then I closed Eclipse.
4.- Run Eclipse 3.5 and selected c:\users\me\eclipse\workspace-3.5 as the workspace location (you can also use the -data argument I think).
5.- Downloaded and installed the PDT plugin (I develop in PHP).
And "Voila", now I'm able to run Eclipse 3.4 and 3.5.
BTW, even if I had to install the PDT plug in, I didn't had to touch the configuration. It took the former one from the workspace folder.
There is some information at help.eclipse.org/galileo/index.jsp, look in Workbench User Guide\Tasks\Upgrading Eclipse.