Troubleshooting
Yes, sometimes things are broken. If EclipseME does not appear to be working properly, We are happy to have you report it here. You can help me enormously, however, if you do a little legwork before entering a bug report.
Please collect the following basic configuration information:
This helps tremendously in attempting to recreate the bug.
The more detail you provide, particular step-by-step detail, the better. In particular, provide as many of the Preference settings as you can, along with a step-by-step description of what you did, what you expected, and what happened. If there's a bug in the code, I have to be able to isolate the part that's faulty, which means I have to be able to do what you did. It sounds elementary, but many times it's the exact sequence you did things, or some non-obvious interaction between settings that trigger a problem.
As you know, Eclipse stores settings and other state information in your workspace. By default, your workspace is stored in the directory named workspace within your Eclipse installation directory. You also can specify a particular non-default workspace directory using the -data command line option when invoking Eclipse.
Within the workspace directory, there is a subdirectory named .metadata. This, in turn, may contain a file named .log. Unix users, remember that files that being with the character "." are hidden by default. You will need to use the "-a" option to ls in order to see them.
The .log file contains valuable debugging information, particularly exception traces. One way to help me isolate a problem is to close Eclipse, delete this file, then run Eclipse, cause your problem to happen, and then close Eclipse again. Now look to see if a .log file has been created. If it has, include this file as part of your report.
If you have the Plugin Development Environment loaded, this same information can be more easily obtained by opening the "Error Log" view. If you don't have the PDE loaded, this view is not available.
Sometimes it is necessary to know exactly what command line EclipseME generated for a particular WTK invocation. When you run Eclipse, add the arguments
to your Eclipse command line. This will cause extra debugging information to be placed into your .metadata log file. Then include the log information as described above.
While any developer would rather that a bug be reported multiple times than not be reported at all, before entering a bug report, please check the current list at SourceForge to see if somebody has already reported your problem or a similar problem. I try to keep the number of outstanding bugs fairly short, so it won't take too long for you to look through, and if somebody has already reported something similar, there may be a work-around.