Mr N

By the former Chairman of Uni-Lever:

The person who gets on best, is the person who makes the most of the situation in which they find themselves.

Following the success of my Eclipse 3.5 - Galileo - New and Noteworthy blog posting, I’ve decided to do the same for Eclipse 3.6 - Helios. I will update this page when the New and Noteworthy pages become available.

• Eclipse 3.6 M1 - New and Noteworthy
• Eclipse 3.6 M2 - New and Noteworthy
• Eclipse 3.6 M3 - New and Noteworthy
• Eclipse 3.6 M4 - New and Noteworthy
• Eclipse 3.6 M5 - New and Noteworthy
• Eclipse 3.6 M6 - New and Noteworthy (API Freeze)
• Eclipse 3.6 M7 - New and Noteworthy (Feature Freeze)
• Eclipse 3.6 Final (23 June 2010)

For extra information see the Eclipse Helios Project Plan.

You have to hand it to Mike Myers! Vanessa Kensington: Mr. Powers, my job is to acclimatize you to the nineties. You know, a lot’s changed since 1967. Austin Powers: No doubt love, but as long as people are still having promiscuous sex with many anonymous partners without protection while at the same time experimenting with mind-expanding drugs in a consequence-free environment, I’ll be sound as a pound!

In order to have an effective build environment we must check-in all the resources needed to build the project from scratch; this includes support libraries and support applications. For example one of my projects arrives as an installable deliverable, but in order to create it we need a Java compiler, Java source, property files, NSIS (A scriptable win32 installer/uninstaller system by Nullsoft), Doxygen (documentation generator), JUnit (unit tester) and a whole host of support libraries. So in order to truly build the project from scratch all these products need to be saved. Clearcase, while being an excellent source controller, leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to importing a directory structure into its control. So lets pretend that we have just finished off our testing and it’s check-in time. For the sake of space I’ll only show you how to check in one of the set of support applications, in this case JUnit. Our support software is located at: Z:\java\libs\junit\latest I would like to import it into: Z:\java\libs\junit\junit-4.7 and then create a clearcase symbolic link called latest to point to junit-4.7. This is a really handy way of testing new libraries without changing lots of aspects of your environment.

1. Firstly find out what the name of the view is that you are going to import into. In my case “t2_6_14″.
2. Open a command shell as the VOB owner using the command:

   runas /user:research\ccadmin cmd

3. You are now logged in as the VOB owner so your Z: drive (with the shell) is gone. You only have the K: drive which is used by the views directly.
4. In the location where you want to do the import, create a folder with the same name as the folder you are importing e.g.

   mkdir k:\t2_6_14\java\libs\junit\junit-4.7

5. Run the import command with full paths:

   clearfsimport -recurse k:\t2_6_14\java\libs\junit\latest\* K:\t2_6_14\Quentin\ManagerLibs\junit\junit-4.7

6. Hopefully, it should start chugging away.
7. When it has finished delete the latest folder.
8. Oddly the directory you created will be renamed to “junit-4.7.keep” and a new folder will be created by clearcase called “junit-4.7″, and this will contain the imported files. It is now safe to delete the unchecked-in “junit-4.7.keep”
9. As a final touch we will create our symbolic link to join “junit-4.7″ to “latest".
10. Checkout parent folder: k:\t2_6_14\java\libs\junit
11. Run the link command:

    cleartool ln -s junit-4.7 latest

12. Lastly, check in the junit folder.

Now practice!

Got attacked by a virus which went straight through Firefox’s defences then straight through McAfee’s defences then destroyed half of my machine. It’s still not running right, but I think the virus is now gone. The virus attacked my Java installation and destroyed the classpath. When I tried to run Eclipse it flashed the splash screen and disappeared. There did not appear to be any error message from Eclipse to give me a clue as to the problem so I had to run Eclipse from the command line to find out what was going on.

1. Open a command prompt
2. Change directory to the root of Eclipse’s installation e.g. cd c:\java\eclipse
3. Call the Eclipse executable directly e.g. eclipse.exe

Eclipse spat out the following error message:

Error occurred during initialization of VM java/lang/NoClassDefFoundError: java/lang/Object

My normal java setup still appeared to be fine, it was just Eclipse that wasn’t working. So I tried running Eclipse from the command line, avoiding the eclipse.exe executable. I used the following command line to kick start the equinox package manager and launch Eclipse. In my example I’m using Eclipse 3.5 Galileo, but in your version of Eclipse the launcher version may be different.

java -jar plugins\org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.200.v20090520.jar

This worked and launched Eclipse, but it immediately started to have problems with Java heap space which in turn caused problems for Background Indexer Crash Recovery and Initializing SpringSource Bundle Repository index. I eventually had to kill it. Next, I tried launching Eclipse with extra command line options found in eclipse.ini:

java -Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5 -Xms40m -Xmx512m -jar plugins\org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.200.v20090520.jar

It seemed to work, but then I got:

Error while logging event loop exception: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method) at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:621) at org.eclipse.osgi.internal.baseadaptor.DefaultClassLoader.defineClass(DefaultClassLoader.java:183) at org.eclipse.osgi.baseadaptor.loader.ClasspathManager.defineClass(ClasspathManager.java:576) at org.eclipse.osgi.baseadaptor.loader.ClasspathManager.findClassImpl(ClasspathManager.java:546) at org.eclipse.osgi.baseadaptor.loader.ClasspathManager.findLocalClassImpl(ClasspathManager.java:477) at org.eclipse.osgi.baseadaptor.loader.ClasspathManager.findLocalClass_LockClassLoader(ClasspathManager.java:465) at org.eclipse.osgi.baseadaptor.loader.ClasspathManager.findLocalClass(ClasspathManager.java:445) at org.eclipse.osgi.internal.baseadaptor.DefaultClassLoader.findLocalClass(DefaultClassLoader.java:211) at org.eclipse.osgi.internal.loader.BundleLoader.findLocalClass(BundleLoader.java:376) at org.eclipse.osgi.internal.loader.BundleLoader.findClassInternal(BundleLoader.java:452) at org.eclipse.osgi.internal.loader.BundleLoader.findClass(BundleLoader.java:405) at org.eclipse.osgi.internal.loader.BundleLoader.findClass(BundleLoader.java:393) at org.eclipse.osgi.internal.baseadaptor.DefaultClassLoader.loadClass(DefaultClassLoader.java:105) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:252) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:320) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.ui.refactoring.reorg.CopyToClipboardAction$CopyToClipboardEnablementPolicy.canCopyToClipboard(CopyToClipboardAction.java:333) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.ui.refactoring.reorg.CopyToClipboardAction$CopyToClipboardEnablementPolicy.canCopyAllToClipboard(CopyToClipboardAction.java:324) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.ui.refactoring.reorg.CopyToClipboardAction$CopyToClipboardEnablementPolicy.canEnable(CopyToClipboardAction.java:312) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.ui.refactoring.reorg.CopyToClipboardAction.canEnable(CopyToClipboardAction.java:134) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.ui.refactoring.reorg.CopyToClipboardAction.selectionChanged(CopyToClipboardAction.java:100) at org.eclipse.jdt.ui.actions.SelectionDispatchAction.dispatchSelectionChanged(SelectionDispatchAction.java:262) at org.eclipse.jdt.ui.actions.SelectionDispatchAction.selectionChanged(SelectionDispatchAction.java:257) at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.Viewer$2.run(Viewer.java:162) at org.eclipse.core.runtime.SafeRunner.run(SafeRunner.java:42) at org.eclipse.core.runtime.Platform.run(Platform.java:888) at org.eclipse.ui.internal.JFaceUtil$1.run(JFaceUtil.java:48) at org.eclipse.jface.util.SafeRunnable.run(SafeRunnable.java:175) at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.Viewer.fireSelectionChanged(Viewer.java:160) at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.StructuredViewer.updateSelection(StructuredViewer.java:2132) at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.StructuredViewer.handleSelect(StructuredViewer.java:1160) at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.StructuredViewer$4.widgetSelected(StructuredViewer.java:1190) Logging exception: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space

I tried increasing the memory allocations with:

java -Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5 -Xms40m -Xmx700m -jar plugins\org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.200.v20090520.jar

but it just delayed the problem. The next stage was to remove Java from my system. The current installations were corrupted to the point that I couldn’t use the Add or Remove Programs to uninstall them. I used regedit to search the registry for any entries that contained references to Java/JDK/JRE and deleted them. To end the clean up I deleted all the installation files from disk. Finally, I installed the JDK. I placed the JDK in c:\Java\Java\jdk1.6.0_16 and let the installer choose the location for the JRE. Re-ran the Eclipse’s shortcut and all was well.