tom alison dot com

Eclipse and Ubuntu Karmic

Today, for the first time in a while, I wanted to work with some Java code. I've always used Eclipse for Java programming, so I headed to their web site to download the latest version.

I don't keep up with the Eclipse project anymore. I'm sure they're doing lots of great stuff, but every time I visit their site - about once every six months - I'm more and more confused by the menu of download choices. It used to be that you just downloaded Eclipse. Not anymore.

Having just done a clean install of Ubuntu 9.10, I decided on a whim to see if it a packaged version of Eclipse built just for Java programming. Sure enough they did:

sudo apt-get install eclipse-jdt

Perfect. Everything installed correctly and a nice little 'Eclipse' choice appeared under Applications > Programming.

Eclipse launched and things were copacetic...until I tried to install plugins. Oddly, when I chose "Install new software...", there were no pre-configured repositories. In a normal installation you'd see the default Eclipse update site, which offers a dizzying array of add-ons. But here there were no platform capabilities to add.

I didn't fret too much - after all, I just wanted a simple Eclipse installation optimized for Java programming. I did, however, also want to add the Subversion and Maven plugins.

I added their respective update sites to the my Eclipse preferences and tried installing both plugins. No luck. Each plugin reported unsatisfied dependencies related to 'org.eclipse.gef' or 'org.eclipse.zest'.

I knew those dependencies would be fulfilled by the current Eclipse platform update site. I just couldn't figure out what the URL was. I found the GEF update site, which seemed like a sure bet, but it failed to resolve anything.

Things did not become clear until I stumbled across this comment in an Ubuntu bug report:

org.eclipse.emf is not installed by default; try adding http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo to your update sites and try again.

Ah...finally - the canonical Eclipse platform update URL. After following those simple instructions, my plugins were able to resolve their dependencies correctly and everything worked great.

The logical question, posed by a commenter in the bug report, is:

...shouldn't this galileo repository configured by default after installing the eclipse packages?

Seems reasonable. The answer:

Yes; that repository should be configured by default - most of our plug-in install related problems are actually related to it. If we knew how to make the build do it, then we would.

While I respect any developer honest enough to say "I don't know how to do it", the answer is unsatisfying. Offering a packaged version of Eclipse without the core platform update site is pretty close to offering a broken software package.

I'm sure someone will figure out a solution and fix the problem. My wild-ass guess is it involves generating TouchPoint Instructions to add the respositories correctly.

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