Eclipse

If you don’t know or care about the tooling platform Eclipse, stop reading. If do you care, you may have had this problem:

You install a new version of a feature you already have installed by copying the files into the “features” and “plugins” folders, and Eclipse doesn’t recognize the newer version. This usually happens on Windows machines with a FAT32 filesystem. That filesystem doesn’t update folder timestamps nicely when the content of a folder changes, so Eclipse doesn’t know to rescan for newer versions.

To enable a newer version of a feature you manually installed, start Eclipse, go to “Help > Software Updates > Manage Configuration”. Select the existing version of the feature, click “Replace With Another Version”, then choose the newer version.

The good news is that this bug will go away after Eclipse 3.3. If you start a newer version of Eclipse using the command-line argument “-clean”, it will force a rescan of the features on the disk, regardless of timestamp.

Enough time has been spent fixing bugs and getting basic things working. Hopefully, this site will help fix that.

I mostly work with Java and Eclipse, but do enough web stuff to beat my head against a wall every once in a while. This site will have tips, tutorials, bug workarounds, and anything else I can think of that people might find worthwhile.

I suppose I could start with the simplest and most embarrassing debugging problem I ever hit…

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