Much ado about scripting, Linux & Eclipse: card subject to change

2009-06-25

My love-hate with SVN, Part 4: Corrupt Metadata & Going Over Quota

Ever had one of those days where nothing seems to work? Most of June's been that way for me...

This week I decided to trust my OS and let Fedora update me automatically to the latest release, Fedora 11. I've never tried a distribution upgrade; in the past I've only ever done a clean install (be it Windows, Ubuntu, MEPIS, AntiX, or Fedora). But I figured if @dougschaefer could do it, so could I.

It was fairly smooth sailing, though the handy gui tool preupgrade only downloaded packages but didn't do the upgrade, so on reboot (still in F10) I had to run preupgrade-cli "Fedora 11 (Leonidas)". I suspect I must have fatfingered my hard drive password when I rebooted he first time because it worked like a charm the second time. Overall, way more successful than attempts so far to make a Mac Pro get Fedora'd, thatsfersure (grub, video, and network card issues, to name but a few).

Anyway, now I have updated versions of subversion and python, and as a result, my Subversive projects in Eclipse don't work. After much cursing and experimenting (and updating my CollabNet Subversion version to 1.6.3, the solution seems to be simply this:

Check out the projects anew within Eclipse, and if necessary, diff local changes from old project to new project.

But, if the project is too big (jbosstools trunk folder is over 1.1G) you may get a heap error. You can check the whole project out via commandline, but Eclipse (or Subversive? or Mylyn?) uses too much memory and the whole thing dies, despite my running Eclipse w/ a half-gig of heap:

/home/nboldt/eclipse/eclipse/eclipse -clean \
  -showLocation -data /home/nboldt/eclipse/workspace-jboss \
  -vmargs -Djava.library.path=/opt/CollabNet_Subversion/lib \
  -Xmx512M -XX:PermSize=512M

In this case, the solution is to check out the project without recursing into folders.

Commandline on in the Console view, that looks like this:

svn checkout "https://svn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/trunk@HEAD" -r \
  HEAD --depth empty  "/home/nboldt/eclipse/workspace-jboss/jbosstools-trunk"

You can then copy stuff you already checked out into the new target project, then refresh the project in Eclipse. Of course in my case Eclipse then thought all the files were new, so I had to Override and Update from the repo.

Another 24374 files or 1.1G to download. No wonder I went over my quota this month!

(Really, it was due to several different .iso torrent downloads for Fedora and CentOS, along with the movie Dead Alive, just in time for BLITEOTW day!)

So, unfortunately, I haven't been able to enjoy any of the 33 projects in this years' Eclipse Galileo release, unlike others on the Planet and the BirdsNest have. Hopefully next month will see calmer seas.

On the plus side now that I'm running Fedora 11, I can use Delta RPMs thanks to the yum-presto plugin... so next month's bill should be much, much smaller.

2009-06-24

I know it's a beta, but c'mon...

In addition to crashing a few times a day, Firefox 3.5b4 has this cool overlapping button feature on its "fail whale" page:

HOWTO: Enable Firefox 3.0 extensions in Firefox 3.5 for great justice

Just updated to Fedora 11, and with it Firefox 3.5b4. Sadly, that meant most of my extensions (including mouse gestures!) no longer worked... until I found this:

In A.D. 2009,
Firefox 3.5 was beginning.
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Fedora 11 repo set up us the beta.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main browser turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
FF35: How are you gentlemen !!
FF35: All your extensions are belong to 3.0.
FF35: You are on the way a vanilla Firefox.
Captain: What you say !!
FF35: You have no chance to survive wait for GA.
FF35: Ha ha ha ha....
Operator: Captain !! *
Captain: To put back every 'extension'!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Install this.
Captain: For great justice.
Captain's Log - Additional: Here's the same extension for Thunderbird 3.0b2, though I had to disable the quicksearch toolbar box as it wouldn't close properly in TB3; also found some handy toolbar buttons here for filtering a mailbox for all/unread.

2009-06-23

Workspace #fail

Another obscure and unhelpful error message that now pops up about once every five minutes while I'm working in Eclipse. Upgraded to Eclipse 3.5 a day before the official release (thanks to my Friends of Eclipse membership), but to no avail. Evidently my workspace is pooched somehow.

Why can't more error messages tell you *HOW TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM*, rather than just reporting that something went wrong? Surely as software devs we should be able to do better... if for no better reason that to avoid having to listen to end users like myself complain? :P

2009-06-15

Eclipse 'Vote For Pedro' Plugin?

Got this today. No idea why / how. Anyone ever seen this?

WTP Cruise Control #fail #eclipse35

Nine days without a green build this close to GA? Seriouslywtfbbq, people!

2009-06-03

P2: The Publisher

The publishment has begun [1].

Read all about this enhanced replacement for the Metadata Generator.