Another year, another SR1 release, another deafining amount of silence; the Eclipse organization released maintance release one of Eclipse 4.4 three days ago.

As usual, there’s no notion of this event anywhere on the eclipse.org homepage. What counts this time is the Eclipse Newsletter about Project Quality and the fact that LocationTech has announced the 2014 Tour. The actual IDE that is Eclipse doesn’t seem to be that important.

As it appears, there were 131 bugs fixed for this release in the core of Eclipse.

Among others a high profile bug is fixed where Eclipse generated a bad class file and another bug where JSR 45 support (JSP debugging among others) was completely broken.

Furthermore several bugs related to Java 8 were fixed. As Eclipse uses its own compiler (JDT), supporting new language features is always extra difficult for Eclipse as compared to other IDEs that just use javac.

Eclipse 4.4 SR1 fixed some nasty issues with lambda type inference (and another one), deserialization, bridge methods, and explicit null-annotations.

Unfortunately, even with the focus on Java 8 fixes, a very basic and known type inference bug is still in Eclipse 4.4.1, as found out by my co-worker Jan Beernink:

This time around even the good people from the WTP project did not feel like posting about the SR1 event on their homepage. Fiddling with the friendly bugzilla URLs revealed a list of 32 bugs that are likely to be fixed in WTP 3.6.1, the version that should be the one that’s bundled with Eclipse 4.4.1.

Among the highlights of bugs that WTP 3.6.1 fixed is a fix for that fact the JSF EL validation is too strict and that when using the famous “Run on Server” feature, a wrong URL mapping is used.

Following the trend, community reporting is even lower than last year. This year there’s virtually no reporting at all. There’s a lone post from an Eclipse vendor, and that seems to be it.

Unfortunately Eclipse 4.4.1 also introduced a major new bug, one that’s appears right away when you startup a completely clean freshly downloaded instance:

java.lang.ClassCastException: org.eclipse.osgi.internal.framework.EquinoxConfiguration$1 cannot be cast to java.lang.String at org.eclipse.m2e.logback.configuration.LogHelper.logJavaProperties(LogHelper.java:26) at org.eclipse.m2e.logback.configuration.LogPlugin.loadConfiguration(LogPlugin.java:189) at org.eclipse.m2e.logback.configuration.LogPlugin.configureLogback(LogPlugin.java:144) at org.eclipse.m2e.logback.configuration.LogPlugin.access$2(LogPlugin.java:107) at org.eclipse.m2e.logback.configuration.LogPlugin$1.run(LogPlugin.java:62) at java.util.TimerThread.mainLoop(Timer.java:555) at java.util.TimerThread.run(Timer.java:505)

It seems clear that SR releases aren’t that exciting, but the complete lack of attention to them and the completely silent releases of what should be the most important product that the Eclipse organization delivers remains a curious thing.

Update

Maybe after reading this article (who knows ;)), but a few days later the Eclipse organisation did finally post about the release event, and the following appeared on the eclipse.org homepage:

2014/09/29

Eclipse Luna SR1 Now Available

The SR1 release of the Eclipse Luna release train is now available for download.