Wednesday, May 29, 2013

The most significant feature of Kepler Eclipse on Fedora

Yeah, I know I'm kind of repeating myself, but look what happens after you update Eclipse in Fedora 19:

Eclipse after update in F19

P2 discovers that you're system installation had been changed, finds what you have installed as a regular user, and then asks you to install those things again, providing you a nice wizard:

Features reinstallation wizard page
This is a big step forward since previous Fedora releases, where Eclipse package update caused a loss of user installed features, or even totally broke the installation.

Of course, not only Linux will benefit from this approach, but all setups, where users have only read-only access to a master installation administered centrally.

Edit: Things never go as smoothly as one would wish. The problem that I was having with this dialog was that when I had multiple Eclipse installed, from time to time, the dialog was trying to reinstall things from "wrong" Eclipse installation.

It turned out to be a feature, not a bug. Eclipse, when shared install is run for the very first time, tries to find previous installation on the best-can-do basis. This scenario is a bug for Fedora, because Fedora Eclipse has only one location that does not change, and therefore if there is no local configuration for that location, it means that nothing should be reinstalled. I think a solution is as easy as setting this property to the Fedora installation:

-Declipse.p2.skipMovedInstallDetection=true


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