Can't install on some instances of Eclipse Indigo (Mac)

[vazexqi]

Participant cs-104 has trouble installing CodingSpectator on Indigo M7. Eclipse says that CodingSpectator is installed but neither the preference pane nor the uploader is available.

I was able to install CodingSpectator on a clean instance of Indigo M7 so I suspect that some plug-in is causing an issue. I'm going to get a list of installed plug-ins from participant cs-104 to see what is wrong.

[vazexqi]

More detailed symptoms of the problem:

1. Java perspective disappeared completely.
2. Eclipse says that CodingSpectator is installed but I can't find any inklings of it. There wasn't a preference page or the uploading dialog.

Participant cs-104 was using a 32-bit version of Eclipse on a Mac that had Java 1.6 (64-bit) installed. We managed to solve the problem by installing a 64-bit version of Eclipse.

I am still not sure why CodingSpectator was able to bring out this error. The participant had other plug-ins installed but they did not cause this problem. I am not aware of how CodingSpectator uses 64-bit. Did we specify that we require a 64-bit environment? I know that we specify that we use Java-1.6

[vazexqi]

I can reproduce this problem on my older Mac running OS X 10.5. I believe that this issue is related to the fact that CodingSpectator requires Java 1.6 and that version is unavailable on some machines (32-bit or 64-bit). When that happens, CodingSpectator cannot run. And because we patch JDT, JDT also cannot run.

The original version of JDT only requires Java 1.4

Proposed solution: lower the requirements of CodingSpectator to Java 1.5 if we discover that a lot of other participants are having this problem.

[reprogrammer]

I don't know where the dependency on 64-bit Eclipse comes from. It might be a dependency of JDT that CodingSpectator has inherited. Again, I don't know why JDT might have such a dependency.

[vazexqi]

I think there isn't a dependency on 64-bit Eclipse. The dependency is on a Java-1.6 VM. On participant cs-104's machine, there were these JVMS:

• Java 1.5 32 bit
• Java 1.6 64 bit

Because participant cs-104 downloaded Eclipse Indigo 3.7M7 for 32-bit JVM, Mac OS X must have chosen to use the only 32-bit option JVM available i.e. Java 1.5. However, this would be a problem because we specifically said that CodingSpectator requires Java-1.6.

I wonder why Eclipse does not perform this check when it is installing CodingSpectator to ensure that Java-1.6 is available and that it is being used to run the installation of Eclipse that the user wants to install CodingSpectator into.

If we want to do more testing, I suggest that you try this with a machine that has both Java 1.5 and Java 1.6 installed. Then try starting Eclipse+CodingSpectator with the Java 1.5 runtime to see what happens. And repeat with Java 1.6.

[reprogrammer]

That makes sense. We should be able to lower the dependency to Java 1.5.

[Wanderer777]

CodingTracker uses class Properties to keep track of the known files. This class is thread-safe only starting with Java 1.6. So, we either keep Java 1.6, or if we lower the dependency to Java 1.5, we would need to make Properties thread-safe externally.