Troubleshooting Eclipse.org Mirrors / Using Profiles & Target Platform Definition Files With Tycho

If you look in the mirror and you say his name 5 times, he'll appear behind you breathing down your neck. - Candyman

If only troubleshooting mirrors was so simple. Have you ever been running a build or an install which stalls at the provisioning step, with a message like:

[INFO] Fetching org.eclipse.birt.integration.wtp.ui_2.6.0.v20100617-1315.jar.pack.gz (4.3MB of 46.13MB at 171.56kB/s) from http://mirrors.xmission.com/eclipse/birt/update-site/2.6/plugins/org.eclipse.birt.integration.wtp.ui_2.6.0.v20100617-1315.jar.pack.gz

The solution here is often simply to force p2 to pick a specific mirror rather than letting it choose any mirror it wants.

How, you ask?

Well, assuming you were polling this site looking for artifacts to install or update...

http://download.eclipse.org/birt/update-site/2.6/

... you would then change that URL to this, and look at the list of available mirrors:

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/birt/update-site/2.6/

Now it's a trivial matter to select a mirror that's close to you and try that instead of the download.eclipse.org mirror, such as:

ftp://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/eclipse/birt/update-site/2.6/

---

If you're running a Tycho build, this URL should be changed in your parent-pom.xml ...

<url>http://download.eclipse.org/birt/update-site/2.6/</url>

... or your .target platform file, depending on which way you're building.

<repository location="http://download.eclipse.org/birt/update-site/2.6/"/>

If you rely on a parent-pom.xml, make sure you're activating the profile with the revised URL...

mvn3 clean install -U -B -fae -Phelios

... or, if you're building against a .target platform file, make sure you update the URL in that file, and that your build points to the profile which will load the .target file.

mvn3 clean install -U -B -fae -P!helios,helios-no-target

UPDATE, 2010/08/11: Forgot to mention that there are a number of p2 update site zips available here to help with your offsite mirroring: http://download.eclipse.org/athena/repos/.

Blog comments or spam? No idea.

I don't speak Chinese. Or Korean. Or Japanese. I mention this because lately I've been getting a couple comments per post in a foreign character set, and I can't tell if it's spam or a legit comment.

Please, if you have something to say, stick to English, French, German, or Spanish. Hell, even Latin, lolcode, or twitterspeak. Anything other than that I'll just delete as spam.

kthxbai,

Nick

Update Site Aggregation: B3 vs. Tycho

Last year, I used to aggregate update sites with the Buckminster Aggregator, but since that won't install into Eclipse 3.6 (Helios), I had to migrate to the B3 Aggregator. This new version of the Aggregator is greatly expanded and worked fine until recently, when it has begun to suffer from a rather nasty p2 problem: instead of the Director just installing the aggregator into an Eclipse instance prior to then running the aggregation, I get "The copies of profile SDKProfile are not in sync," and the whole process dies. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

So, in order to find a workaround, I went back to Tycho, and discovered you can merge update sites with little more than two simple files:

• a site.xml, which lists the features to aggregate and how to categorize them, and
• a pom.xml to list the source sites and drive the aggregation.

Unfortunately the Tycho solution doesn't include the ability to add associate sites to the metadata after generation, but that can simply be done as a downstream step (Tycho can call Ant using the maven-antrun-plugin).

pogoplug network attached storage (NAS) for linux, mac, windows

A couple months ago I bought a PogoPlug. Because it's an ungodly pink colour and because I've been hella busy with other stuff, I finally unboxed it today, and discovered that while:

• it's a snap to configure through the web UI
• it works with ext3 and fat32 drives
• it's SSH accessible, and
• there are other installable linux apps for it

... setting it up for Linux was not entirely trivial.

While the above article helped, a couple points were not immediately obvious:

• If you mount the drive as root, it's not accessible as anyone else; if you mount as the user, not even root can read it.
• Use of a /etc/pogoplugfs.conf file is highly recommended, so that you can log in w/o having to key in your username and password every time. Create this file as root, and set it chmod 644 if not already:

  svcuser=you@email-provider.com
  svcpassword=web-login-password
  logseverity=10

• To automount the drive on startup (eg., on my old xubuntu 6 system), as root, try creating a new file, /etc/init.d/pogoplug:

  #! /bin/sh
  ### BEGIN INIT INFO
  # Provides:          
  # Required-Start:    $remote_fs $syslog
  # Required-Stop:     $remote_fs $syslog
  # Should-Start:      $named
  # Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
  # Default-Stop:      1
  # Short-Description: pogoplug fs mount as myusername
  # Description:       pogoplug fs mount as myusername
  ### END INIT INFO
  
  sudo -u myusername /usr/bin/pogoplugfs --mountpoint /media/pogoplug
  
  exit 0

• Then, to activate this file, as root:

  chmod +x /etc/init.d/pogoplug; \
  for x in 2 3 4 5; do \
    cd /etc/rc${x}.d; ln -s /etc/init.d/pogoplug S99pogoplug; \
  done

With Fedora 12, I could simply create a startup task using System < Preferences < Startup Applications from the gnome menu.

#FailWhale v2.0

#Fail Bot?
-- Someone's been watching too much made-for-tv sci-fi, I think

My love-hate with SVN, Part 8: Installation Ease Of Use (UPDATED)

Back in July 2009, I blogged about My love-hate with SVN, Part 6: Installation Ease Of Use. With Helios just around the corner, I wanted to produce an updated repo for use with the latest & greatest Eclipse 3.6.

Now the <p2.mirror/> script will fetch and use Ant-Contrib automatically.

Here's the updated 15M update site zip, which includes the following:

Subversive 0.7.9
SVN Connector 2.2.2
SVNKit 1.3.3
JNA 3.2.3
ECF 3.1.0

Any problems, please report them in bug 284077.

So long and thanks for all the faece

I'm done with Faecebook. Here's why. And here's how to quit. I encourage you to do the same.

Instead, find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

HOWTO: Build a XulRunner 1.9.1.2 Update Site with Tycho 0.8 + Maven 3

0. Install Maven 3 by downloading then unpacking the tar.gz:

cd /tmp; \
wget http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/apache/maven/binaries/apache-maven-3.0-alpha-7-bin.tar.gz; \
tar xvzf apache-maven-3.0-alpha-7-bin.tar.gz; \
chmod 755 apache-maven-3.0-alpha-7/bin/mvn; \
alias mvn3='/tmp/apache-maven-3.0-alpha-7/bin/mvn'

1. Check out sources:

cd /tmp; \
svn co http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/branches/modular_build/xulrunner/; \
wget http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/jbosstools/branches/modular_build/parent-pom.xml

2. Run build:

cd xulrunner; mvn3 -fae clean install

3. You will get a p2 repo / update site in the target folder of the site project, from which you can install XulRunner or XPCOM into your Eclipse.

cd site/org.mozilla.xulrunner.site/target/site

---

Note that the parent-pom.xml used above can in fact be much simpler. You only need the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project>
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>org.jboss.tools</groupId>
  <artifactId>org.jboss.tools.parent.pom</artifactId>
  <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <name>JBoss Tools Parent</name>
  <packaging>pom</packaging>
  <properties>
    <tychoVersion>0.8.0</tychoVersion>
  </properties>
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.sonatype.tycho</groupId>
        <artifactId>tycho-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>${tychoVersion}</version>
        <extensions>true</extensions>
      </plugin>

      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.sonatype.tycho</groupId>
        <artifactId>target-platform-configuration</artifactId>
        <version>${tychoVersion}</version>
        <configuration>
          <resolver>p2</resolver>
          <environments>
            <environment>
              <os>macosx</os>
              <ws>cocoa</ws>
              <arch>x86</arch>
            </environment>
            <environment>
              <os>macosx</os>
              <ws>carbon</ws>
              <arch>x86</arch>
            </environment>
            <environment>
              <os>win32</os>
              <ws>win32</ws>
              <arch>x86</arch>
            </environment>
            <environment>
              <os>linux</os>
              <ws>gtk</ws>
              <arch>x86</arch>
            </environment>
            <environment>
              <os>linux</os>
              <ws>gtk</ws>
              <arch>x86_64</arch>
            </environment>
          </environments>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
</project>

Better Bootstrapping For Athena Projects

Inspired by Tycho and Maven, I've simplified the self-bootstrapping process for Athena builds.

Previously, you needed a start.sh script to fetch org.eclipse.releng.basebuilder and org.eclipse.dash.common.releng before you could run a build; if on build.eclipse.org this is done for you automatically. Or, if building locally (or on Windows), you had to fetch these yourself.

Now, you can simply tell your build.xml to bootstrap itself, and it will fetch those projects for you. You can also tell it which version of basebuilder or common.releng to use, rather than being tied to the defaults.

For details, see Getting Started - Bootstrapping.

Cleaner Ant Build Logs: Get Rid of "Trying to override old definition of task"

If you use macros in Ant, you have probably seen clutter in your log such as

Trying to override old definition of task ...

Here's how to purge this garbage from your log and keep your build output cleaner.

1. move your macros into a target such as <target name="init">
2. have your main target(s) depend on the target that defines the macros
3. call your macros

You can make your log even quieter with -q when running ant, eg., ant -f build.xml -q

Here's a complete example that will first self-bootstrap itself by downloading Ant-Contrib, define two ant macros, and produce very quiet output (unless debug=true):

<project default="run">
 <property name="COMMON_TOOLS" value="${java.io.tmpdir}" />
 <property name="debug" value="false"/>

 <target name="get.ant-contrib" unless="ant-contrib.jar.exists">
  <property name="ANTCONTRIB_MIRROR" value="http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ant-contrib/" />
  <get usetimestamp="true"
       dest="${COMMON_TOOLS}/ant-contrib-1.0b2-bin.zip"
       src="${ANTCONTRIB_MIRROR}/ant-contrib-1.0b2-bin.zip"
  />
  <touch file="${COMMON_TOOLS}/ant-contrib-1.0b2-bin.zip" />
  <mkdir dir="${java.io.tmpdir}/ant-contrib-1.0b2-bin.zip_" />
  <unzip src="${COMMON_TOOLS}/ant-contrib-1.0b2-bin.zip"
         dest="${java.io.tmpdir}/ant-contrib-1.0b2-bin.zip_"
         overwrite="true"
  />
  <copy file="${java.io.tmpdir}/ant-contrib-1.0b2-bin.zip_/ant-contrib/lib/ant-contrib.jar"
        tofile="${COMMON_TOOLS}/ant-contrib.jar"
        failonerror="true"
  />
  <delete dir="${java.io.tmpdir}/ant-contrib-1.0b2-bin.zip_" includeemptydirs="true" quiet="true" />
 </target>

 <target name="init">
  <available file="${COMMON_TOOLS}/ant-contrib.jar" type="file" property="ant-contrib.jar.exists" />
  <antcall target="get.ant-contrib" />

  <taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antlib.xml">
   <classpath>
    <pathelement location="${COMMON_TOOLS}/ant-contrib.jar" />
   </classpath>
  </taskdef>
  
  <macrodef name="debug">
   <text name="echo" />
   <sequential>
    <if>
     <and>
      <isset property="debug" />
      <istrue value="${debug}" />
     </and>
     <then>
      <echo message="@{echo}" />
     </then>
    </if>
   </sequential>
  </macrodef>

  <macrodef name="list.count">
   <attribute name="list" default="" />
   <sequential>
    <var name="count" value="" />
    <for param="listitem" list="@{list}" delimiter=", ">
     <sequential>
      <var name="count" value="${count}0" />
     </sequential>
    </for>
    <length property="list.count.return" string="${count}" />
   </sequential>
  </macrodef>
 </target>

 <target name="run" depends="init">
  <property name="list" value="foo bar baz"/>
  <list.count list="${list}" />
  <debug>For list [${list}], size = </debug>
  <echo>${list.count.return}</echo>
 </target>

</project>