Eclipse Plugins For RedHat

You know how they say you shouldn't look at the sun during an eclipse or you'll go blind?  If there was any truth to that, why aren't there villages full of blind people in third world nations.  Why aren't there myths about the time that everyone on Earth went blind?  Think about it...  There had to be a first eclipse.  Who told the first dude not to look at it or he'd go blind?  Read on for the answer.

In the mean time, I've been beating myself up for a few days trying to get the Epic plugin for the Eclipse IDE installed.  I've got it on my Fedora desktop at home, and wanted it for a Linux machine at work, but the eclipse-epic RPM wasn't on Satellite. Simple enough: download it and install it from Epic-IDE.org... and spend the next several days wonder why it doesn't work.

The first issue is that the documentation has not been updated in several revisions, so the instructions for Epic are completely out of line with Eclipse 3.x.  Every time I would try follow a path through the point an click menus that seemed reasonable, I would get a message such as "could not find jar" or "no software site found at jar".  The obvious problem would be permissions, but all files and paths were world read-able.

The next obvious choice was to start hacking under the hood.  I looked at the Fedora eclipse-epic RPM and compared it to the Eclipse install tree.  I thought what seemed like a promising option when I found a plugins directory, but I could never get the machine to pickup the files.

Then, I tried something soooo stupid, it had to work.  I entered some arbitrary text into an unrelated field.  Of course it immediately launched exactly as expected.  The trick is to understand that which undocumented fields are required, but not checked by the application.  So, on Eclipse 3.x on RedHat Linux, to add a plugin:

Extract (unzip) the plugin
Launch Eclipse
Help / Install New Software...
Click Add... and Local...
Browse to (not into) the extracted directory
Click OK
*** In the Name field, provide some text ***
Click OK

The plugin options should appear in the pop-up window.  From this point, it should just be a case of checking boxes and accepting defaults.  Right?  Wrong!  Now we get dozens of lines of Java-esque errors, which for those of you who have ever worked with Java is line after line of completely useless garbage.  Take for instance the line:

No repository found containing: osgi.bundle,

A reasonable person might think that this and the fifty lines that follow it are telling you that there is a missing dependency.  Obviously, what that means is that the only way to install the plugin is to be root.

Remember those permission problems from earlier?  Its not that we didn't have permission to the files we just installed, its that we don't have permission to the Eclipse installation tree.  So...

Exit Eclipse
Open a terminal window and su to root
Launch Eclipse from the command line
Help / Install New Software...
Select "Available Software Sites"
Highlight the failed plugin
Click Remove and OK

Continue from "Click Add..." in the step above.

As for why the first human didn't go blind during the first eclipse?  He was too busy trying to figure out why his wheel wouldn't roll, because the instructions didn't mention that it had to be upright.