Sunday, October 19, 2008

Rescued from Eclipse by Time Machine

In preparation for getting back to work on jSuneido I thought I would get the recent updates. I go to Help > Software Updates and click on Update, I get:
The software items you selected may not be valid with your current installation. Do you want to open the wizard anyway to review the selections?
I didn't select anything so I'm not sure what it's referring to. I click on Yes. There are some errors related to "equinox". A quick web search indicates that's the Eclipse runtime. That sounds pretty basic, why would it have errors?

I try again, but this time I do select, just Eclipse Platform and Eclipse Java Development Tools. That runs for a while, and I say ok to restarting. So far, so good. I go back into the updates, don't select anything (which seems to be the same as selecting everything), and get similar errors. I uncheck the first item in the list, Antler IDE and the errors go away. I tell it to go ahead, it runs for a while, and I say ok to restarting. But instead of restarting I get:
Eclipse executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library
A Google search doesn't find anything that sounds like my problem or helps much. Now what? Reinstall Eclipse? I start on that path and download the latest, but then I realize I'll have to reinstall all my plugins. Yuck.

At that point I happen to notice the Time Machine (OS X's automatic backup system) icon spinning in the menu bar. A light comes on. I should be able to restore to before my problems using Time Machine! Sure enough, a few minutes later I'm back to before things got messed up. (I was a little disappointed that it restored the entire folder, rather than just what had changed. It's smarter when it's backing up. But I guess you don't restore that often, and it didn't take too long.)

I re-did the Platform and JDT updates and left the rest. I think I'll just ignore them for the time being and try to get some real work done. These frequent "automated" updates are great ... until they don't work.

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