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

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

3 comments:

Donald Smith said...

At the risk of being a smart ass, it looks like you have an encoded string that's too long.

Just shorten your encoded strings ;)

nickb said...

Thanks ever so.

I suppose actually *finding* the offending string has been left as an exercise for the reader?

mise-en-scenester said...

yah i wasn't encoding any strings explictly either. just another example of eclipse being flaky for no good reason. i got so sick of the error that i poked around my workspace folder for a culprit. what i eventually found was that the .DS_Store file (a Mac system file) had roughly the size that was indicated in my error. you can see it by running "ls -al" in your workspace folder from the terminal. if you're on a PC, then maybe you're having a problem with a different system file.

i deleted this file (since i don't believe it's needed for anything essential) and the error appears to have gone. hope this helps!