Hidden Clause

The other day I went back to work on a plug-in and found that the plug-in editor was misbehaving. I have multiple installs of Eclipse (3.4 and 3.5) installed on (K)ubuntu and I suspected that might be the problem even though I never had a problem with multiple installations of Eclipse before. Heavens! What’s a blogger to do?

In fact I did what most people would do: I went to Google. What I found was Saminda Wijeratne’s blog where the problem was the same, but the solution described was quite different than I eventually discovered. However, I discovered the solution because the blog encouraged me to go to the Eclipse Preferences window and look at the Plug-in Development –> Target Definitions.

At that point I realized that the ${eclipse_home} variable was pointing to my 3.4 installation instead of 3.5! A little bit more digging also led me to discover that I could not change ${eclipse_home} explicitly within Eclipse. The solution is probably specific to Kubuntu: when I added Eclipse 3.4 and 3.5 to KDE using the Menu Editor I did not set the Advanced –> Work Path. I thought Eclipse would be smart enough to get it right, but I turned out to be wrong (not a good habit to get into).

In the image below notice how the Work Path for the highlighted Eclipse 3.5 entry specifically references my 3.5 path.

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Once that was done, saved and tested there was much joy in Wonderland.

The cat was alive (though it took a while to find it).