Eclipse and the Console

Starting in the warmup to 3.3M7 there is a second launcher on Windows: eclipsec.exe.

The Eclipse launchers in 3.3 have had issues with various aspects of the console on Windows. See some bugs: 146807, 167310, 168726, and 173962.

All of our problems came from the fact that the eclipse.exe was linked as a UI application and not a console application. In 3.2, the console behaviour was tied to using java.exe instead of javaw.exe, but starting in 3.3 M5, the vm is loaded in the eclipse process using the JNI Invocation API.

So just like javaw/java, we now have eclipse/eclipsec. Eclipsec.exe is linked as a console application so that the OS handles allocating the console for us. Using eclipsec.exe does not imply any default arguments, so you still need to specify things like -console and -consoleLog.

Equinox launcher & Swing

The equinox launcher starts the Java VM using the JNI invocation API. Because we are such good friends with SWT (and also because it is easier) the VM was always started on the first thread. This turns out not to be so good when you want to run Swing on the Mac. There was a conversation about it over on EclipseZone.

So I fixed the bug (181698) today by adding a new option to the launcher "--launcher.secondThread". Use it if you want swing to work. This option can be compared to the -XstartOnFirstThread for the java launcher.

Source Feature generation with PDE/Build

One of the cool features in PDE/Build is the generation of source features and plug-ins. This is perhaps one of those features that leads towards the "black magic" reputation that we seem to have.

Recently the CDT SDK builds have been missing their source. The source features and plug-ins exist, but they just didn't contain any src.zips. After some investigation, it seems that a long standing bug in pde.build has risen to the surface. It has always been there, it was just hidden by bug 114150 which was fixed in M6.

The workaround for the CDT is simple: just make sure that in the SDK feature, the generated org.eclipse.cdt.source feature is included after the org.eclipse.cdt feature upon which it is based.

Unfortunately, I'm sure that the fix in pde.build will be a bit harder.

EclipseCon 2007

As everyone knows, EclipseCon 2007 is March 5-8. I will be presenting a long tutorial on PDE Build with Pascal Rapicault and Sonia Dimitrov. I will also be giving a short talk on the new launcher story.

I even got a pretty little graffic:

Feature Version Suffixes in PDE/Build

This week I released a patch from David Olsen which is a significant change to how pde/build calculates feature version suffixes. The details are in bug 157049, as well, the problems outlined in bug 162020 are fixed as a consequence.

The biggest thing to note is that the major, minor and service segments are now included in the calcuation. This covers the case when a plugin decrements its qualifier and increments, for example, the service number.

These changes will be in 3.3 M5. There may be cases where these changes could cause a one-time decrease in the version suffix, so builders picking up these changes are advised to increment their feature qualifiers.

Equinox Launchers and SWT splash screens

The Eclipse Integration build I20061219-1300 has the new Equinox launchers in it. Read all about them on the wiki, and in my email to the Eclipse-dev mailing list.

This will allow for some potentially cool things to happen in the splash screen.

I have been slowly going crazy getting this stuff working on all the different platforms. There are still problems on linux.x86_64, linux.ppc, and aix.ppc.

Everybody's doing it

All the cool people are doing it, and if I'm ever going to be famous I suppose I should start too.

So this is my blog, I wonder if anybody will actually read it.