What does it mean if an eclipse perspective is shown in angle brackets?

Question

I wrote a new perspective for our Eclipse RCP Project, which worked fine. But because of a malconfiguration I had to revert to an earlier code-version in which this perspective didn't exist yet.

The strange thing is, that after the revert the perspective still shows up in the open perspective Dialog. The only difference is, that it is now shown in angle brackets and appears two times.

So the entries in the open perspective Dialog look like that:
---
a valid perspective
another valid perspective
<perspective that shouldn't be here>
<perspective that shouldn't be here>
yet another valid perspective
---

What do the angle brackets mean?

And how can I get rid of these entries?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

You can delete the perspective by going to Window->Preferences then select general->Perspectives.

Highlight the 'bad' perspective (the one with angle brackets) and click Delete.

Gone forever :-)

Answer 2

Try to delete the complete runtime workspace!

Answer 3

Just a wild guess, did you trying the -clean option while launching eclipse? Cached workspace entries could lead to sporadic behaviour.

Answer 4

I think it means the perspective had to be "recovered" in some way, so the file gets duplicated and renamed.

I had the same <> around my highly-custimozed perspective after I couldn't open my workspace due to errors about corrupted workspace. I downloaded a fresh copy of eclipse and pointed it to the old workspace, but an error box showed which explained that it couldn't find some views for the plugins that were not installed, and then I was applied the perspective without those views. The file must have been changed, because the perspective does not include them even after reinstalling the plugins, and selecting 'Reset Perspective' and such.