2010-07-11 Sunday - Eclipse Helios Upgrade Experience

Ouch.

I've been a user of Eclipse for many years...and all previous experiences with new releases have been very good.

This most recent release (Eclipse 3.6 - Helios) has included a few bumps along the way - primarily due to the mis-adventures of 32-bit and 64-bit applications on a 64-bit OS (Windows 7).

First - I had to uninstall the 32-bit version of the Oracle/Sun Java SE JDK and install the 64-bit version (for which I chose the latest version: 1.6.0-u21)

Second, I discovered that the CollabNet binaries for Apache Subversion are only available in a 32-bit distribution for Windows.

Arggghhh.

[whispers in my mind begin to ask, "So, should you be thinking about making the leap to Git now?"]

Fortunately(?) - I found that the Slik SVN binaries are available in 64-bit....and installed the command-line tools. 

I also installed the Eclipse Subclipse plugin.

Observations:
- I can browse my existing Subversion respository
- I can create a new folder in the Subversion repository
- Trying to do a commit to an existing Subversion folder appears to hang within Eclipse/Subclipse...not sure why just yet...time to dig into the Eclipse logs and see if I can identify the root cause.

Note: I tried running the svnadmin upgrade and recover commands - but still no joy.

I also tried installing Subversive - but it appears to hang on install...


One bloggers's rant against Eclipse...

I'll post more updates as I work through the issues.

12:20pm...

Created a new repository folder to experiment with Subversive...

I imported one of my previous Eclipse projects to do some testing...

Curious...now I'm seeing this error: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space

See: http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=msg&goto=546114&

See: http://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_How_do_I_increase_the_permgen_size_available_to_Eclipse%3F

Forcing the vmargs on the command line (as parameters to the Eclipse.exe) seems to have resolved the issue).  I'm currently using the following value:  -vmargs -XX:MaxPermSize=1024m

Also, it helps to actually read the documentation:
http://help.eclipse.org/helios/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.platform.doc.user/tasks/running_eclipse.htm

2:15pm...

I've re-installed the Subclipse plugin - and it seems to be working now...

Whew!


2010-07-22 Update:
Apparently there is a known issue:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/07/eclipse-java-6u21;jsessionid=AFD82F08E186AEF90C51470744180292