ECD successfully installed, but "Class Decompiler Viewer" unavailable

[kriegaex]

Eclipse 2018-12, JDK 11.0.2.

I tried installing ECD both from Eclipse Marketplace and from your update site, both times the same result:

• Version 3.1.1 successfully installed (I can see it if I check the list of installed components after restart)
• ECD not active
• "Class Decompiler Viewer" view unavailable when trying to associate it with *.class file type
• Plugin settings also unavailable

This looks like a bug to me, unless I did something phenomenally stupid during installation.

[RobertZenz]

Can you define "unavailable"? Are there errors in the error log?

[kriegaex]

Can you define "unavailable"?

That is not a very good question, because I already answered in in detail. "Not available" means "not there", "invisible".

Are there errors in the error log?

That is a good question. I am attaching a screenshot. Please look at the top block. The two other blocks are probably from previous tries to install it.

[kriegaex]

New information: I also inspected the other log messages (not just the filtered ones). For some reason Eclipse complained about missing write access to the configuration directory. I have no idea why, because I also installed other add-ons before, e.g. AJDT (AspectJ Development Tools) without any problems. Anyway, I quite unelegantly granted full access rights for my Windows user to the whole Eclipse directory and everything inside it, then reinstalled ECM (core only as I wish to use Fernflower anyway because I know it from IDEA), and now it works. I only had to set ECD as default for unknown class files, which was my main usage goal. So unless you think there is a chance that this problem is ECM-specific because ECM needs access to directories other add-ons do not, I think you can close this one.

[RobertZenz]

Thanks for the detailed answer.

I quickly skimmed the code which is concerned with the preferences, and I did not find anything unusual. However, I'm not familiar with the whole code-base and there is the possibility that there is still something fishy somewhere. I'll leave this open for now as it requires some testing to see if the plugin is maybe trying to write into a directory which it should not.

[helospark]

Unfortunately this seems like a common issue with Eclipse plugin installation on Windows even though it was supposed to be fixed in 2010.
See https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=320383 and a bunch of duplicates at https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=322929
I also received issue like this helospark/SparkBuilderGenerator#17

I think you repro by just install the Eclipse to the Program files folder (or other where administrator permission required to write) and try to install some plugin. Plugin will show up as installed but will not work (silently fails halfway in install).
I don't have a clean Windows to try this right now, but if you have, it may worth to open another bug regarding this to Eclipse.

[kriegaex]

I can confirm that I installed Eclipse in a subdirectory of C:\Program Files because I like to keep installed programs in the same directory and it works for all other types of software. An installer can always ask for elevated rights during installation and then set the right access rights during installation or simply keep configuration somewhere else (user home).

Thanks for looking into this even though the root cause might be an Eclipse problem.