Eclipse Plugin Fails to Load

Question

Eclipse can some times fail to load plugins. I have experienced this E3.7 with both ScalaIDE and GroovyEclipse.

In both cases some times the syntax highlighting fails. Also I have noticed some times plugin related menu items and popups do not appear. This is very much evident when you use the Pulse Eclipse distribution.

This is aggregated after using Eclipse of a while and going through a few updates. Some times a clean unzip and a download of the required plugin solve the issue.

Is there a way to get around these issues?

Answer 1

What are the problems with the plugins? Are they not found at all, or do they fail to load?

When you start up Eclipse, open the view "Plug-in Registry", find the plugin that causes problems and select to diagnose the plugin. This will determine if there are some dependencies that arent satisfied.

How have you installed the plugins? The correct way to do this is to use update sites. Just downloading and unzipping into the plugins catalog is not recommended.

There is also a trick to start up an OSGI console to diagnose plugins, see my answer here

This page can also provide some more help.