[Alexandru Popescu]

While trying to get Mylyn installed on MyEclipse 7.5 I have noticed the Planned list of installation actions link.

When checking what’s behind that I have got the following list:

com.powerpulse.profile-0-rb-218851 remove 2.0.0
com.powerpulse.profile-0-rmb-141002 add 2.0.0
com.sysdeo.eclipse.tomcat remove 3.2.1
org.eclipse.team.svn.core remove 0.7.5

(and quite a few more, but it is quite impossible to list them by hand in here).

The list basically contains:

1. the list of Mylyn plugins/dependencies to be installed. These are listed as add x.y.z
2. the above com.powerpulse.profile which I am completely unsure what it is, so can you please offer some more details?
3. a list of plugins I have installed in the /Library/Genuitec/MyEclipse 7.5/dropins folder which are scheduled for **remove**. Why are they scheduled for removal? I definitely need those plugins and I haven’t instructed MyEclipse to remove them.

Can you please explain what’s going on?

[Riyad Kalla]

Alex,

Good question, first let me address the overall question with the clarification that this behavior is actually correct (yes, it’s weird/confusing, but correct).

I’ll answer the rest of your questions and provide some clarification on what’s going on:

1. p2 currently cannot veto a pending update when any software or updates are installed — so for example, if you were on MyEclipse 7.1 and just wanted to add Subclipse, you would also have to pull down the MyEclipse 7.5 update as well — it *sounds* like Mylyn did an update recently that is getting picked up along with whatever other changes you are trying to apply.

2. A “profile” is just a definition of software… basically Eclipse + any software you like to run. Pulse (the underlying software management system that provides all this software installation management and updating features) manages your profiles this way and when you make changes to them, by adding or removing software, those changes are shown as a pending update because the profile (on disk) has been revised with some changes. It’s really more internal Pulse bookeeping.

3. The removal is only temporary and queued up at shutdown — the reason this is done and actually needed is because the behavior of /dropins is to *implicitly* add that software into a running profile no matter if it resolves or not — p2 (and by association Pulse) have very robust and sometimes strict dependency resolution rules that allow them to scour the web when trying to resolve and install software — Pulse/MyEclipse have enhanced the /dropins functionality in p2 to just be a “shut up and load this, don’t try and be fancy with it” mechanism for folks that KNOW a piece of software works and just want to drop it in and have it load without worrying about it possibly not resolving and installing correctly because the plugin author defined some dependency wrong or something.

Because of that, and to ensure you don’t introduce a piece of software that corrupts your workbench and stops it from starting, the /dropins software is temporarily removed whenever a change is made to the profile so on restart the plugins are re-resolved and loaded back into the new profile with changes and all.

This avoids the “I can no longer run my workbench after adding XYZ plugin” scenarios that can be caused if you tried to install sysdeo via /dropins and then install it via Pulse as well or something like that.

The net-net though is that those plugins work fine, on every restart they are there, loaded up and working just fine.

I hope that helps clear things up.

[Author]

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