Uninstalling and Deleting plug-ins from eclipse

Question

I am uninstalling a plugin named X from eclipse uninstall option. Now to make a clear approach I went to the eclipse plugins directory and delete the plugin jar file from there. Now I am trying to reinstall the same plug-in and eclipse prompts an error saying

An error occurred during the org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.engine.phases.CheckTrust phase. session context was:(profile=epp.package.jee, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.engine.phases.CheckTrust, operand=, action=). Error reading signed content. The file "D:\\Testing\\eclipse-jee-helios-SR1-win32\\eclipse\\plugins\\x_1.1.3.jar" does not exist

Now how to resolve the above issue

Answer 1

I have similar issue. I deleted those plugins related files from eclipse/plugins and eclipse/features directory. The reason why I did that is because I have already uninstalled the plugins from eclipse but the files remain in both directories. I solved it by editing the eclipse/artifact.xml. I search all the artifacts with the id of my plugins and remove them. And I am able to reinstall the plugins again :)

Answer 2

You should never delete plugins you installed using the Eclipse installer under Help>Install New Software. Now there is directory used to drop in plugins as jars, which I am assuming you used, if so deleting it would result in the desired behavior assuming you shut down eclipse before hand. If not then you need clean your configuration area. In the future when removing go to Help>Install New Software>Already Installed software, there should be a remove once your there. :)

Goodluck.

Answer 3

As per eclipse documentation

You should not remove plug-ins from Eclipse. Plug-ins should be installed as features using the Update Manager. The same Update Manager can be used to disable plug-ins by disabling the feature they belong to. Run Help > About Eclipse > Installation Details, select the software you no longer want and click Uninstall. (On Macintosh it is Eclipse > About Eclipse > Installation Details.) In older versions, you might need to Run Help > Software Updates > Manage Configuration..., select the feature of interest, and disable it with the task shown in the right window.

When a feature is disabled, all its plug-ins will be disabled also. They are still available on disk, and they can be enabled at any time in the future.

To physically remove the feature and its plug-ins, you will have to manually remove the feature from the eclipse/features directory and its plug-ins from the eclipse/plugins directory. We advise extreme caution here. Remove the wrong ones, and you may have quite some trouble restoring your Eclipse to a stable state. Unless you care a lot about hard disk use, we recommend leaving the plug-ins where they are.

Note that when manually removing plugins as described above, some metadata is still cached by Eclipse, which can lead to problems later on. Running Eclipse with the -clean option can help with that, as it causes Eclipse to clean the cached metadata

Answer 4

1. Run eclipse
2. Rename eclipse exe to eclipse.exe.back
3. Run updates
4. Updates executed successfully

Answer 5

Thanks .. I am not sure what action actually fixed the exact problem i had.
I removed the plugin related files from plugins and features folder, removed entries from the artifact.xml file and opened eclipse with -clean option.