Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Eclipse update manager not launching

Recently I faced an unusual issue with Eclipse. The update manager would not launch. When I clicked on Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install nothing happened. The issue was similar to the one reported here.

I started the eclipse with -debug option. On the launcher console, it logged something like bookmarks.xml file could not be read due to premature end of file. Checked file C:\eclipse\configuration\org.eclipse.update\bookmarks.xml, it was indeed 0 (zero) bytes!! How did that happen? Probably, a scandisk run truncated the damaged file after power failure which is common in Pune these days :-(

Anyways, I restored the bookmarks.xml file with some update sites that I could remember:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<bookmarks>
<site name="Regex tester" url="http://brosinski.com/regex/update" web="false" selected="false" local="false">
<site name="Code Style checker" url="http://eclipse-cs.sourceforge.net/update" web="false" selected="false" local="false">
<site name="Find bugs" url="http://findbugs.cs.umd.edu/eclipse/" web="false" selected="false" local="false">
<site name="ByteCode viewer" url="http://download.forge.objectweb.org/eclipse-update/" web="false" selected="false" local="false">
<site name="Multi-project plug-in" url="http://eclipse-tools.sourceforge.net/updates/" web="false" selected="false" local="false">
<site name="PyDev python IDE" url="http://pydev.sourceforge.net/updates/" web="false" selected="false" local="false">
<site name="Jboss tools" url="http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/stable/" web="false" selected="false" local="false">
<site name="Eclipse Europa" url="http://download.eclipse.org/releases/europa/" web="false" selected="true" local="false">
</bookmarks>
Eclipse is now starting fine and launching the update. Only issue is that I have lost some update sites bookmarked earlier. Probably by restoring the damaged bookmarks.xml file with an empty content, something like given below, might also help eclipse to launch the update manager and the bookmarks can be added back later from Eclipse update manager.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<bookmarks>
</bookmarks>

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