Installing Subversion plugin in Eclipse —14 May 2012

Sometimes Eclipse really sucks. Today I wanted to upgrade my subversion plugin and ended up wasting a lot of time on it.

How to upgrade a plugin in Eclipse?

  • Help / Check for Updates

    • This will scan all your plugins, taking a long time, when I want to upgrade one specific plugin
    • In this case it’s also pointless (as I found out later), as the Subversion plugins are on separate upgrade sites per version (different site for 1.6, 1.8, etc)

  • Help / Install New Software

    • It seems this is the way to go, but why so non-intuitive name?

Well this didn’t work. I got all kinds of errors that didn’t make much sense:

  • Cannot install XYZ plugin because it already exists. Upgrading instead.

  • Except it could not upgrade, due to some conflicts in dependencies which again, didn’t make much sense.

  • Next I tried uninstalling all Subclipse related plugins to resolve the conflicts.

  • The uninstall seems to work successfully, but when I try again the install, it still complains that XYZ plugin is still installed.

  • Next I tried removing all the files in ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins that seem related.

  • Then I get stuck when downloading the new jars, ”read timed out”

    • … despite the fact that I can download those files in a browser
    • … despite the fact that some of the mentioned files are already downloaded in the plugins directory
    • … same result even if I manually download the jars and put them in plugins directory

The final solution was to download the ZIP file from the Subclipse site and install locally, from here:

http://subclipse.tigris.org/servlets/ProjectProcess?pageID=p4wYuA

Eclipse is (usually) pretty great. If only they could iron out these kind of issues already. They existed for as long as I can remember…

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