dow.ngra.de

Configuring Eclipse – “fail fast” November 27th, 2009 | by Ivo Mägi |

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.

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:

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 –

Now let’s just change it to:

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 | View Comments