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There can be a couple of reasons why Eclipse refuses to start: Corrupted workspace, broken plugins or conflicting plugins. This blog post is about the last category.

How do you know that you’re affected? Start Eclipse with the command line option -debug. If there is a huge gap between “Time to load bundles” and “Starting application”, you’re on.

Start Eclipse in a debugger and set a breakpoint in org.eclipse.osgi.internal.module.ResolverImpl.findBestCombination(ResolverBundle[], ResolverConstraint[][], int[], List<ResolverConstraint>).

The interesting information is in the variable bestConflictBundles. This is basically a list of bundles that cause some kind of trouble. Usually, this is a bundle which has the singleton flag set but of which are two versions in the plugins folder (or in the plug-in list, if you started Eclipse from another instance of itself).

If you started Eclipse from itself (using a launch configuration), the solution is to open the “Debug Configurations…” editor, select the “Plug-ins” tab:

This tab has several interesting options: You can type (part of) a plug-in ID into the filter field to narrow down the huge list. If the list isn’t active, select “Launch with: plug-ins selected below only” above.

That way, if you want to disable all of BIRT, type “birt” and then click “Deselect all” to the right.

Next stop is the “Validate Plug-ins” button in the bottom left. This opens a dialog with all the problems the current selection has. This dialog isn’t modal! That means you can keep it open while you (de-)select plugins from the list. If your screen is big enough, you can move it so you can see the list and the “Validate” button. That way, you never need to close the dialog.

Otherwise, Alt+V is your friend.

In my example, the org.eclipse.jpt.jpa.db plug-ins cause trouble. As you can see, I pulled them out with a short text in the filter. Now, I can get rid of them with a single click on “Deselect all”. Validate … okay, things for worse.

But I don’t need anything from JPT for my tests, so I get rid of the whole lot. Validate … “No problems were detected.”

Sweet.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2012 at 14:51 and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.