Friday, October 05, 2007

TM 2.0.1: the Terminal can be too fast

In spite of all our testing, two critical regressions have been found in the TM 2.0.1 Terminal widget: Bug 205393 can cause a StackOverflowError (causing all of Eclipse to shut down), bug 205186 makes the terminal paint incorrectly on Mac OSX.

We're working on fixes with high urgency. For more info, see the Known Issues and Workarounds page on the Wiki. Enable "Watch" on it or the bugzilla's related to get informed about latest news.

For now, we need to recommend terminal users to NOT YET UPGRADE to 2.0.1 but stick with the 2.0 implementation.

Friday, September 28, 2007

TM 2.0.1: Can a Terminal be too fast?

The Eclipse DSDP Target Management project just released its 2.0.1 service release with Europa SR1.

This release includes more than 150 bug fixes for seamless editing of remote files over SSH, FTP or other protocols, which many users have learned to like particularly for editing remote web servers.

What's new is that non-ASCII Encodings for file and path names in foreign languages now work properly; the Eclipse Filesystem (EFS) provider got a lot more stable, especially over FTP; and, in my opinion the pearl of this release, the Terminal got lightning fast (up to 1000 times faster on Windows, thanks to Michael Scharf's new implementation).

Can a Terminal be too fast? - When working remotely on build.eclipse.org and I'm browsing a remote file, it now scrolls so fast that I'm almost not sure whether it scrolled or not. That's a little bit strange at first, but thanks to the big buffer I can still view everything that got displayed. Awesome, Michael!

For more information, read the build notes. To grab it, just use the Download Page or get it with Update Manager from the Europa Discovery Site.

For things beyond plain remote file editing, and particularly more embedded things, the TM project made plans at its recent Face-to-face meeting in Toronto. The vision is to be the Eclipse "Explorer of the Network Neighborhood", with pluggable information providers under a single, consistent UI and a lot auto-discovery going on. Want to learn more about what's coming up? - If you happen to be at Eclipse Summit Europe just 10 days from now, drop in at my talk: The DSDP Target Management Project, Wednesday at 2:30 pm; or, join Doug Gaff's Systems Engineering for Device Software Development Symposium on Tuesday (requires registration by E-Mail with Doug).

Monday, July 09, 2007

DSDP-TM / RSE 2.0.0.1 critical patch release

The Eclipse DSDP Target Management Project submitted a critical patch release of its Remote System Explorer (RSE) on Friday Jul 6. TM 2.0.0.1 fixes the following issues by changing 6 lines of Java code compared to TM 2.0 released with Eclipse Europa:
  • bug 192741 - RSE: Moving a folder from within a ZIP Archive doesn't work if > 1 level deep: This bug is relevant when using the RSE archive handlers in order to manipulate ZIP archives on the Local or DStore hosts. The bug could lead to loss of data because moving files out of an archive would delete the files in the archive although they were not extracted properly before. This bug has been fixed.

  • bug 194204 - RSE FTP: Renaming Files/Folders moves them sometimes: This bug is relevant when using RSE FTP in order to rename files on a remote FTP host. Because the current directory was not considered properly, renaming a file could move it to a different location, without checking what files are at the other location. If a file with the same name as the one being renamed already existed at the incorrect target location, that file could be overwritten without notice, leading to loss of data. This bug has been fixed.
Users of TM / RSE 2.0 are strongly encouraged to get the 2.0.0.1 patch release in order to avoid potential loss of data when using the RSE FTP or Archive Management functionality. The new bits are available either by download, or by choosing Help > Software Updates in Eclipse. When using the dstore protocol, an updated server must be downloaded and installed.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Target Management: M6, EFS and a Webinar

The Eclipse Target Management Project just released its M6 Milestone (downloads | update site). Given that you have Eclipse 3.3M6 installed, it will also be available from the Europa Discovery Site shortly.

Top news besides lots of refactoring and API cleanup is that the RSE Eclipse Filesystem (EFS) integration has been promoted from "experimental" to "stable". It allows taking any remote file system available through RSE (like the ssh, ftp and dstore connections) and making it available as resources in the Eclipse Workspace. By sitting at the heart of the Eclipse Resource System, the full power of Eclipse - including source parsers, outline views, content assist and the like - comes to remote files as well.

Although quite a few EFS implementations have been around so far, Target Management / RSE is the first one that solves the problem of logging in to remote systems and keeping credentials in a usable UI. We'll continue working on the integration as described on plan item 170916 in order to iron out final issues and further improve performance.

EFS is a great concept of making the Eclipse Workspace more flexible, but components and plugins need to be aware that the resources they work on can now be remote as well. Work is going on through Platform Plan Item 154126, similar work items in CDT and other tools to improve their EFS integration. Up to now, however, this work has been hard tue to a lack of good EFS implementations. We hope that the new Target Management / RSE EFS implementation will help foster the adoption of EFS in the committer and plugin provider communities.

If you want to learn more about the Eclipse Target Management Project, your perfect choice of getting first-hand information about it is the upcoming Webinar hosted by the Eclipse Foundation on Thursday April 12 at 8am PDT / 11:00 am EDT / 3:00 pm UTC. In 45 minutes, you'll get an intro on the TM concepts and architecture, see an online demo, learn about upcoming plans, and get the chance to ask the TM project leads any questions you have.

Note added on 17-Apr-2007: The TM EFS Provider was fixed later in order to resolve issues running out of handles on SSH connections. These fixes were released as TM 2.0M6a. Users who already downloaded M6 can easily update out of Eclipse: Choose Help > Software Updates > Manage Configuration, find the "Remote System Explorer" feature, choose Scan for Updates.

Friday, March 16, 2007

TM / RSE Usage Survey

Every product needs to know their users. Thus I'm conducting a survey of companies and products that plan to adopt Eclipse Target Management / RSE in the next year or use it already.

Both commercial products and in-house usage are interesting.

If I have not contacted you directly yet, and you do use or plan to use TM / RSE, please drop me a short E-Mail at

martin.oberhuber (at) windriver.com

I'd like to know your company name and a very rough outline of what you're doing (or planning to do) with TM / RSE. Knowing our users will certainly help our community, thus product quality and also help initiate the next release cycle's planning process, so it's also for your own benefit.

Thanks!