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Mylar can be installed by an Eclipse user using a pre-1.5 version of Java. When they restart Eclipse, they just do not see Mylar, which can be confusing. There are a couple of ways this could potentially be improved: 1) Somehow prevent installing if they are not on 1.5. 2) If they do install on something earlier than 1.5, maybe there could be a plug-in that loads successfully, detects this, and provides a UI instructing the user that they need 1.5. Perhaps show them the version they are using, where the JVM is being loaded from and include some tips on how to control the version of Java that Eclipse uses.
Tentatively scheduling for 2.0 since Europa will still run on 1.4. Patch welcome.
IMHO, this is a more general issue and should be handled by platform.
It definitely should be handled by Platform, but we cannot change the fact that is not. Mylar users are the ones who will suffer because they will install it, not see any problems and then restart and not find it. This is a compromise idea to meet the current needs.
I switched to 1.4 to fix some bugs in Maven, loaded some new plugins, restarted Eclipse and Mylar was gone. After Eugene poked around for 40 seconds using a VNC on my machine he noticed I was using 1.4 and not 1.5 which is required. I know some of us throwbacks still use 1.4 but it would be nice to have a simple warning. I am still relatively new to using Eclipse on a daily basis but there's no real way I would have known this without scouring mailing lists or reading the website which is kind of crappy.
Agreed. Jason: I added you to the CC so that you're updated of when this is completed.
Jeff: quick question (you only need to read this comment). We want to have a plug-in with a 1.4 or lower dependency to warn the user that Mylyn requires 1.5 if they installed it on 1.4 (this happens with reasonable frequency, and is likely to happen a lot more as part of Europa/EPP). So we want to have a plug-in that starts up, checks the JDK version, and if it is less than the minimum execution environment specified by Mylyn to pop up a dialog. I think that such a checker plug-in could be generally useful to any project depending on 1.5. The only problem that I see is that we would have to add yet another startup extension (already have 2 in the distro that we can't get rid of). So I'd really like to avoid another one that has our name on it ;) Naturally the check would be very quick but I can't think of a way of doing it that does not involve forcing activation via org.eclipse.ui.startup, is there a better way?
Done via the startup approach. The aggregate time lost on the startup of millions of installs should still be less than the total time that will be lost by hundreds trying to figure out why something they installed did not show up. So it seems worth it overall. If there's a smarter approach we can switch to that.
Created attachment 71709 [details] mylyn/context/zip
