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No, you can't update, you're at EclipseCon

Eclipsecon Conference 2006 Eclipse Update

In what has got to be the strangest error I've seen recently, I discovered that it's impossible to perform an update from within the WiFi network at EclipseCon.

I've just spent the last couple of hours figuring out why the automated test framework didn't work with my Eclipse install (it said 3.1.0, so naturally I assumed it was compatible with 3.1.0) but given that it wasn't showing up in the features list, I thought that the demo would be a whole lot shorter if I couldn't get it going. OK, it's probably a version issue, jump up to 3.1.2 and see if that fixes it.

So, I went to http://update.eclipse.org/updates/3.1 (as described by the upgrade document) to update. Strange, I was getting an error 0xa9 is an invalid character. Odd. I had a look at the document, and got the error message:

Object not found!

The requested URL was not found on this server. If you entered the URL manually please check your spelling and try again.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.

Error 404

you.are.at.eclipsecon.org
Mon Mar 20 13:59:38 2006
Apache/2.0.49 (Linux/SuSE)

(and the URL had been updated to http://you.are.at.eclipsecon.org/updates/3.1/site.xml)

Anyway, I do what I always do when there's a problem with updates; just downloaded a whole new Eclipse install. Seems somewhat silly that I had to get everything instead of just the deltas, but that's the way it goes and I now have a working test script ...

So, if you're working with test feature, and it doesn't show up in your list, you'll probably need to download a more up-to-date version of the Eclipse platform. Oh, and if you want a handy way of running tests from the command line, here's a good script to do it:

#!/bin/bash
export ECLIPSE_HOME=...
[ -d "${ECLIPSE_HOME}" ] || (echo "Can't find Eclipse in 'ECLIPSE_HOME=${ECLIPSE
_HOME}'";exit 1)

plugin=$1
class=$2
[ -z "${class}" ] && class=${plugin}.AllTests

java -cp ${ECLIPSE_HOME}/startup.jar org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main
  -application org.eclipse.test.coretestapplication
  -testPluginName ${plugin}
  -className ${class}
   formatter=org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.junit.XMLJUnitResultFormatter,${class}.xml