Description Michael Rennie 2011-09-15 16:20:04 EDT

Version: 3.8.0
Build id: I20110912-2126

To try and get a feel for the amount of the work to convert JDT debug to a 1.5 EE, I opened the build path property page and changed the EE to 1.5 (OK). I then went to the compile options page and changed some options to be error from warning / ignore, which caused a full build of org.eclipse.jdt.debug (OK). When I started looking at some of the errors from API tools I found a lot like the following:

The constructor StringBuilder(String) referenced in org.eclipse.jdt.internal.debug.eval.ast.instructions.Constructor.toString() is not defined in the bundle's required execution environment: J2SE-1.4

There are three main things wrong with this error:
1. I just changed the EE for the project to 1.5, but if you don't realize that the buildpath EE and the BREE are seperate this causes confusion

2. The error talks about the constructor for a class I know is not in the code, here is the code the error references:

 InstructionsEvaluationMessages.Constructor_constructor__1 + fSignature;

underneath the class file might be using StringBuilder, but it is confusing.

3. The error marker gets placed on the class definition when we tell you in the problem description that it is in Constructor.toString() - causing confusion

It feels like we have some work to do here to make errors of this kind a bit less confusing. First thoughts:

1. Properly place the error markers
2. Perhaps we could let the user know about the new inconsistency between the BREE and buildpath EE
3. It would be nice if we could better describe the error - basically the user sees the source as two concatenated strings but the error talks about using a constructor from > 1.4.