How can I disable plugin version compatibility checking in Eclipse?

Question

Hi all,

When I try to install Eclipse plugins, I often get an error with details like:

An error occurred while collecting items to be installed No repository found containing: org.eclipse.equinox.concurrent/osgi.bundle/1.0.0.v20090520-1800

This is clearly a bug in Eclipse. The bundle I'm installing doesn't need any special version of anything, it's just a profiler plugin that works in literally any build of Eclipse 3.4. Refusing to install my plugin is not an acceptable course of action. Eclipse should stop showing this message and install the plugin.

I'm not sure exactly what error the Eclipse developers made, but I can see that the version compatibility checker is absolutely strict, and it should not be. Either it is incorrectly evaluating the required bundles, and failing as a result of its own blunder, or the version requirements of the bundles are loosely defined in a way that the version checker does not really understand.

So, is there a way to simply disable this version checker? The thing is crippling my Eclipse install. Frankly, Eclipse would be better if the thing were completely deleted from the application. We only need it to choose the correct version of existing plugins for binding OSGi services. We don't need our development tools to kibitz about whether a plugin seems proper.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Byron

Answer 1

As mentioned in the wiki

The message indicates that the Eclipse provisioning system P2 has found meta data to install a plug-in but can not locate an artifact repository that provides the required downloads

It is suggested to remove update sites and re-add the same update sites, to trigger a refresh, but in your case, it is not your plugin update site which is involved.

There is indeed a bug (236437) with Eclipse 3.4 about "Lost artifact repositories". It has been solved in Eclipse3.5, but if you cannot use that version, there may be a workaround:

1) export the update site listing to bookmarks.xml file (Software Updates->Manage Sites->Export)
2) stop eclipse
3) remove configuration/.settings/org.eclipse.equinox.p2.*.prefs files
4) start eclipse
5) import the bookmarks.xml file (Software Updates->Manage sites->Import) that was exported in step 1

Comment #59 helped me fix my updating problem, thanks!

Though, I think maybe it was enough to just delete the configuration/.settings/org.eclipse.equinox.p2.*.prefs files as I have a feeling that the problem was already resolved before I imported the bookmarks file (things happened a bit in parallel for me here).

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Note for Eclipse3.5 users:

I am seeing this in 3.5.1 when trying to install stuff from an old style update site when I include site.xml:

http://www.perforce.com/downloads/http/p4-wsad/install/site.xml

If I remove site.xml I can install things fine.