Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Am I the only person having problems with the update manager?

I wonder if I am the only person in the world using the update manager and having problems. Two weeks ago I reported a real show-stopper update manager bug: Update does not work if *ANY* error is found in configuration. I expected that it would be marked as a duplicate but I seem to be the only person having the problem. I cannot finish the updates dialog because of some mysterious errors:



The annoying thing is that "Manage Configuration" seems happy and shows no error:



The error is caused by some installed features that require a specific version of a plugin.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feature id="broken.feature" label="Broken Feature" version="1.0.0">
<description>.</description><copyright>.</copyright>
<license>.</license>
<requires>
<import feature="org.eclipse.platform" version="3.1.2" match="perfect"/>
</requires>
</feature>


What puzzles me the most is not the bug itself, but the fact I seem to be the only one getting the bug (I get it with 3.2 and 3.3M1).....

If you want to try it, just unzip this feature in your eclipse/feature directory and restart eclipse and try to install a feature using the update manager.

Workarounds
Fix the feature.xml file by removing the required version string.
Or use another working eclipse installation and install the plugins into a new extension location and add the extension location to your eclipse using "Manage Configuration".

5 comments:

  1. No, you're not the only one.
    I know of the match="perfect" bug.
    I filed a "message contains wrong information" bug some time ago - maybe its fixed.
    I also realized that you cannot install anything in certain cases using Eclipse 3.2 and got the same message.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Michael,

    I have faced similar issues with the Eclipse update manager.

    Specifically, I have encountered them when I tried to mix-n-match integration builds of eclipse.org projects with beta builds of non-eclipse.org projects. In these situations, it would have been great if the update manager provided an user-knows-it-all override feature that could let the user decide what to do.

    An immediate rebuttal for such a feature request is -- it is easy to mess up Eclipse workspaces/installations with such feature.

    Although I agree with the rebuttal, I'd rather have the power to do so and exercise it responsibly/cautiously as opposed to not having the power that would allow me to experiment with ease.

    I think that such a feature can be combined with existing support for checkpointing eclipse configuration to enable users to easily mix-n-match plugins, report failures quickly, and hasten development/integration.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I ran also already in such problems, but there is also another problem for me. I want to have for the whole company a basic Isntallation of Eclipse with special settings for our company. I blogged about that already at http://jroller.com/page/stritti?entry=eclipse_ide_enterprise_configuration1 but nobody was able to help.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hey boss,

    This is not just you. I see this as well. On the Configuration Manager, press that little plugin-with-a-red-icon over it to show the disabled features; this might help you correct your current configuration problem before proceeding.

    --MDE.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I dislike the update manager with a passion. Hopefully the 3.3 plan addresses this.

    The more annoying aspect is that it doesn't use the Bundle.update() semantics that OSGi offers.

    ReplyDelete