5 ms·

Silently Corrupting an Eclipse Workspace on Windows

74 points by robertelder 10y ago

wodencafe 10y ago
I never understood why Eclipse stores plugins in the workspace directory. If you have multiple workspaces that you switch between, you have to install your plugins into each of them.
- james_a_craig 10y ago
  Because if there's more than one of you working on the same project, you want to keep your plugin versions in sync too, I assume.
  - saiya-jin 10y ago
    no it doesn't as other poster mentioned, it's in eclipse installation itself (would be stupid idea even on first sight)
  - wodencafe 10y ago
    But that sync happens at the Project level, not Workspace level.
- nottorp 10y ago
  The real prank here is obviously getting a friend to use Eclipse. I'm not sure you'll ever be forgiven.
- didymospl 10y ago
  It doesn't. .metadata/.plugins in the workspace contains just the plugin metadata(settings, temp files, caches etc) related to the projects in your workspace. Plugins themselves are stored in the eclipse installation directory (%eclipse_home%/plugins to be specific).
monochromatic 10y ago
This seems like it's just a bug, not some ill-considered intentional feature.
- Hussell 10y ago
  Sounds like you're one of those people who use Linux.
- ninju 10y ago
  Yes, I believe the article was meant to be sarcastic...at least that the tone I was picking up
Aliyekta 10y ago
"Unfortunately, I was unable to get this feature to work on Linux. This only serves to further prove that people who use Linux are boring and don't have much of a sense of humor."
- ygaf 10y ago
  The Linux equivalent is any time you tell bash "*".
simias 10y ago
Seems like the author fell victim to a 2nd type of compression-related prank: using heavily artifacted JPEG instead of PNG for pictures of text. More seriously dealing with dotfiles on Windows has always been frustrating. In general Windows special casing extensions left and right sounds like a terrible idea. In particular I wonder what kind of perversion lead Microsoft to think that it was a good idea to hide file extensions by default.
- robertelder 10y ago
  I just updated the site to decrease the compression on the images. I took the compression level from 30 to 80 at a cost of adding about 70k to the total page size. I often try to avoid using png for any images that don't need to look really high quality because the files sizes generally seem to be larger. Having said that I don't know much about the internals of these image formats, so I suppose I should read up on them one of these days.
  - simias 10y ago
    May I ask why you don't use PNGs? For these types of screenshots I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up being smaller than the JPEGs while being lossless. Thank you for taking the time to improve the images though, it's an interesting article nonetheless.
    - robertelder 10y ago
      You were correct. I went back to do some experimenting on file sizes and I was able to update the images to .png with substantially better picture quality and a file size that was lower that the originals that had the artifacts. The page size is now about 20-30k lower than it was originally.
  - lfowles 10y ago
    The biggest reason to not use jpeg for pictures of text [1] is that as more compression is applied it discards the higher frequency components first. Text being full of thin little lines (aka high frequency changes) is one of the first things to be mangled. A quick little test I ran was to take a screenshot of my desktop and the file sizes were: PNG: 735k PNG (optimized w/ pngcrush): 589k JPEG 80: 660k (minimal artifacts, but they can be seen on inspection) JPEG 30: 313k (text regions are starting to get muddy and take more effort to read) JPEG 10: 163k (this is like trying to read text in a colorblindness test, lot of distracting artifacts) On a more positive note, I enjoyed browsing your Documents folder :) [1]: IMO screenshots should use lossless formats in general
euparkeria 10y ago
Oh my god, all that time my backups were worthless.

74 points by robertelder 10y ago

I never understood why Eclipse stores plugins in the workspace directory. If you have multiple workspaces that you switch between, you have to install your plugins into each of them.

james_a_craig 10y ago
Because if there's more than one of you working on the same project, you want to keep your plugin versions in sync too, I assume.
- saiya-jin 10y ago
  no it doesn't as other poster mentioned, it's in eclipse installation itself (would be stupid idea even on first sight)
- wodencafe 10y ago
  But that sync happens at the Project level, not Workspace level.
nottorp 10y ago
The real prank here is obviously getting a friend to use Eclipse. I'm not sure you'll ever be forgiven.
didymospl 10y ago
It doesn't. .metadata/.plugins in the workspace contains just the plugin metadata(settings, temp files, caches etc) related to the projects in your workspace. Plugins themselves are stored in the eclipse installation directory (%eclipse_home%/plugins to be specific).

monochromatic 10y ago

This seems like it's just a bug, not some ill-considered intentional feature.

Hussell 10y ago
Sounds like you're one of those people who use Linux.
ninju 10y ago
Yes, I believe the article was meant to be sarcastic...at least that the tone I was picking up

Aliyekta 10y ago

"Unfortunately, I was unable to get this feature to work on Linux. This only serves to further prove that people who use Linux are boring and don't have much of a sense of humor."

ygaf 10y ago
The Linux equivalent is any time you tell bash "*".

simias 10y ago

Seems like the author fell victim to a 2nd type of compression-related prank: using heavily artifacted JPEG instead of PNG for pictures of text. More seriously dealing with dotfiles on Windows has always been frustrating. In general Windows special casing extensions left and right sounds like a terrible idea. In particular I wonder what kind of perversion lead Microsoft to think that it was a good idea to hide file extensions by default.

robertelder 10y ago
I just updated the site to decrease the compression on the images. I took the compression level from 30 to 80 at a cost of adding about 70k to the total page size. I often try to avoid using png for any images that don't need to look really high quality because the files sizes generally seem to be larger. Having said that I don't know much about the internals of these image formats, so I suppose I should read up on them one of these days.
- simias 10y ago
  May I ask why you don't use PNGs? For these types of screenshots I wouldn't be surprised if they ended up being smaller than the JPEGs while being lossless. Thank you for taking the time to improve the images though, it's an interesting article nonetheless.
  - robertelder 10y ago
    You were correct. I went back to do some experimenting on file sizes and I was able to update the images to .png with substantially better picture quality and a file size that was lower that the originals that had the artifacts. The page size is now about 20-30k lower than it was originally.
- lfowles 10y ago
  The biggest reason to not use jpeg for pictures of text [1] is that as more compression is applied it discards the higher frequency components first. Text being full of thin little lines (aka high frequency changes) is one of the first things to be mangled. A quick little test I ran was to take a screenshot of my desktop and the file sizes were: PNG: 735k PNG (optimized w/ pngcrush): 589k JPEG 80: 660k (minimal artifacts, but they can be seen on inspection) JPEG 30: 313k (text regions are starting to get muddy and take more effort to read) JPEG 10: 163k (this is like trying to read text in a colorblindness test, lot of distracting artifacts) On a more positive note, I enjoyed browsing your Documents folder :) [1]: IMO screenshots should use lossless formats in general

euparkeria 10y ago

Oh my god, all that time my backups were worthless.