Pretend you are your own customer.

Our talk in August at Eclipse Day at the Googleplex focused on what it's like to support a large number of users in an enterprise. Dwelling in this question got me thinking about what kind of Eclipse user I might have been five years ago, and so I looked up the first message I ever posted to our internal mailing list for Eclipse users.

I have been a Google employee for just over five years, and have only spent the latter three supporting Eclipse for my colleagues. At the time of this dialogue, I'd been at Google for less than two months, and my Eclipse experience was limited to about 18 months of mostly untrained use.

Before you bother reading it, please do not waste time troubleshooting the problem -- that's not the point if this post. This is a five year old issue, after all.

Robert Konigsberg
to <eclipse mailing list>
Subject: Problem with Eclipse 3.0 installation
10/10/2004

Hi all,

This afternoon I was working pretty happily in my Eclipse environment. All of I sudden I got a message telling me that I ran out of heap space, and advised me how to change my heap space. It offered to shut down Eclipse. I said "no". saved some work and quit myself.

When I tried to restart Eclipse I got all sorts of odd stuff. I can open Eclipse, but if I try to open the Java perspective, I get the error, "Problems opening perspective 'org.eclipse.jdt.ui.JavaPerspective'. Restarting my machine didn't help. When I try to edit Java preferences, I get similar errors.

Thoughts? Steve, is it Upgrade-To-3.0.1-Day for me?

Cedric Beust
to Robert Konigsberg, <eclipse mailing list>
Re: Problem with Eclipse 3.0 installation
10/11/2004

What does your .log say?  Is it running out of heap space at each launch? In which case, I suggest to launch Eclipse with more heap:

eclipse -vmargs -Xmx600M

Robert Konigsberg
to Cedric Beust
cc <eclipse mailing list>
Re: Problem with Eclipse 3.0 installation
10/11/2004

Don't know which .log I'm looking for. Note below (edited for readability)

~/.eclipse$ find . -name "*.log" -ls
1556 Sep 29 18:20 ./org.eclipse.platform_3.0.0/configuration/org.eclipse.update/install.log
1008 Sep 29 18:20 ./org.eclipse.platform_3.0.0/configuration/org.eclipse.update/error_recovery.log
~/.eclipse$ cd ../workspace/
~/workspace$ find . -name "*.log" -ls
1319 Sep 10 18:17 ./.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.tomcat/catalina.2004-09-10.log
1319 Oct 10 10:50 ./.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.tomcat/catalina.2004-10-10.log
1017 Oct 10 16:48 ./.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.help.base/browser.log
~/workspace$ find . -name "*.log" -exec vi {} ";"

Cedric Beust
to Robert Konigsberg
cc <eclipse mailing list>
Re: Problem with Eclipse 3.0 installation
10/11/2004

Sorry, should have been more specific...

The .log file is in your ${eclipse-workspace}/.metadata directory.

I've removed the rest of the dialogue. Suffice it to say that it was probably a JDT index corruption issue that was resolved by removing the workspace-root/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.root directory.

Here's the point: it's a little embarrassing to see that while I've attained some expertise in this domain, even I had no idea where the workspace log was. Also, I called it the "Eclipse environment" which is kind of a little wrong.

I appreciated both the memory and the mild feeling of humiliation that came with pulling up this old email.