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Configuring Eclipse – “fail fast”

Written by Ivo Mägi on November 27, 2009 – 1:33 pm

Another guest post from our favorite PHB. I don’t have the slightest idea why he has Eclipse installed or better yet, why is he trying to run it. Probably overheard something from devs at the water-cooler and wants some free time from PowerPoint.

My Eclipse instance starts with a warning popup. Well, most likely it picked up a JRE instead of the usual JDK specified in my environment variables. But hey, I know how to handle property files (ed: seriously?), and they are actually pointing me towards the eclipse.ini.

JDK vs JRE

Clicking the link on the warning popup does not open the file itself though, so I have to manually navigate to the C:\Programs\eclipse folder and find eclipse.ini from there containing:

CODE:
  1. -showsplash
  2. org.eclipse.platform
  3. –launcher.XXMaxPermSize
  4. 256M
  5. -framework
  6. plugins\org.eclipse.osgi_3.4.2.R34x_v20080826-1230.jar
  7. -vmargs
  8. -Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
  9. -Xms40m
  10. -Xmx256m

Adding –vm C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_14 to the end of the configuration and restarting. Well – nothing has changed. OK, let’s open up Google.

Proposed solution: -vm option has to be specified before the –vmargs option. Still no help, Eclipse will start with the previously mentioned warning.

Second solution – there has to be a line break between –vm and the value specified – BINGO. We are getting somewhere –

Trainwreck

Now let’s just change it to:

CODE:
  1. -showsplash
  2. org.eclipse.platform
  3. –launcher.XXMaxPermSize
  4. 256M
  5. -framework
  6. plugins\org.eclipse.osgi_3.4.2.R34x_v20080826-1230.jar
  7. -vm
  8. C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_14\bin\javaw.exe
  9. -vmargs
  10. -Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
  11. -Xms40m
  12. -Xmx256m

And it just works. But for heaven’s sake – why on earth do I have to figure out

  • where is the configuration I have to change
  • in which order do I have to specify the parameters
  • that the key-value options must be separated with the line break

Considering the last warning dialog – why cannot the whole configuration be validated and initialization failed properly? If this were a tool used in-house or only by small number of freaks, then – let it be. But this is Eclipse we are speaking about – there are millions of people working their asses off on a daily bases with this tool. Can’t imagine the time wasted for problems like this …


Posted in cool, rant | 2 Comments »

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2 Comments to “Configuring Eclipse – “fail fast””

  1. downgrade Says:

    Configuring Eclipse – “fail fast”: Another guest post from our favorite PHB. I don’t have the slightest ide… http://bit.ly/5QbHaA

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  2. Jörn Zaefferer Says:

    You don’t have to specify the .exe, its enough to point to the bin directory. But even that is stupid: Why not just check for a bin dir in addition to trying for a few executables?

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