Unable to install updates or plugins in Eclipse

Question

At work we use Adobe Coldfusion Builder and got no problem installing plugins like MercurialEclipse. But at home I would like to use Eclipse itself, but am running into many many problems. When I try to contact http://cbes.javaforge.com/update it just says "Unable to read repository at http://cbes.javaforge.com/update/content.jar . Installing updates result in an endless ...pending...

What is going wrong here? I thought it would be the firewall. Turned it off, no succes. Tried reading all the articles about this problem, could not find my solution there as well.

Hopefully someone can pinpoint me to the right direction.

Thanx!! Maarten

Answer 1

Are you using a different version of Eclipse? Try opening the transfers tab before you update and seeing if it's blocking on something like downloading content.jar. If so, the problem is that the repository only supports classic update sites, while Eclipse is only using p2.

As to solving it... I noticed this wasn't working on very recent builds of Eclipse. According to docs, classic is still supposed to be supported. I don't know if this is a change in behavior or a bug. Workarounds would probably be using an older Eclipse, switching to classic updates in Preferences, General/Capabilities, or possibly placing the plugin's zip in the eclipse dropins folder (eclipse/dropins).

I haven't tried these, but the Preferences seems most likely.

I'm using Eclipse 3.7 build I20110526-1708.

Edited

Yeah, you can tell that it's a p2 problem: http://cbes.javaforge.com/update/content.jar is a 404, while http://cbes.javaforge.com/update/site.xml works fine. site.xml is the classic update mechanism.

According to the wiki :

However, users will rarely have a need for enabling Update Manager, because p2 is able to install from any update site that was designed for Update Manager.

I just tried this out myself, and can verify the Capabilites workaround works: After enabling it, go to Help>Software Updates>Find and Install. Click Search for new Features to install, and add your site as a remote site.

It should successfully find the provided features.

As listed on the wiki, this is a workaround, and shouldn't normally be used. I'm not sure why it's necessary; I couldn't find information about it myself.

As for the dropins dir, I made a mistake: it should be a jar file, not a zip. The plugin's jar , which can be found by looking through the site.xml file. This is probably a worse workaround than the first, though.

Answer 2

It may be proxy related issue. Go to network connections preference page and in active provider select manual. Then select HTTP, click on edit and then provide the necessary details. Do the same for HTTPS also in the preference page. Then close the preference page and try again. It should work.