Eclipse Won’t Update Any More
If you use Eclipse with lots of plugins, eventually you might get into a situation where the Software Updates ‘feature’ doesn’t work any more. It will find updates okay, but when you come to install them, you’ll get a message which reads something like “No repository could be found containing bundle…”. I think I’ve solved this problem.
I’m guessing this is because:
- behind the scenes, the new P2 provisioner system (introduced with Ganymede) has located the update and appropriate mirror, but that mirror has not yet received the build products, or
- one or more plugins has added its own ‘associate’ update/discovery sites to the list, which is no longer an update site, or is corrupt, or has gone away completely
This is incredibly frustrating for those of us trying to keep their tools up to date.
Solved
Download, unpack and start the same Eclipse distribution you originally had (J2EE in my case). Don’t start it on your live engineering workspace.
In Software Updates -> Available Software -> Manage Sites, export the sites which are pre-installed there.
In your non-updating Eclipse, in Manage Sites, select all and Remove. Then import the sites from the other installation. That should get it updating again.
Caveat
You’re going to have to find the update sites for your extra plugins and add them in to Manage Sites yourself. This is, in my opinion, a small price to pay to get the updater back.
Doing Updates
Here’s a small trick. When doing updates in Eclipse, make sure the Progress view is visible (Window -> Show View -> Progress) somewhere not covered by the Software Updates and Add-ons window and the inevitable modal Progress Information window. If you do that, you can see a progress bar and not the tiny notification in the bottom right of the Eclipse window.
