Another year, another SR release; the Eclipse organization released maintenance release two of Eclipse 4.5 (aka, MARS.2, aka Eclipse 4.5.2) today.

The release has been done with little fanfare. There’s no notion of this event anywhere on the eclipse.org homepage. On the top of the page at the moment of writing is the Eclipse Foundation + Google Summer of Code and the fact that the EclipseCon 2016 starts March 7. The actual IDE that is Eclipse is not mentioned. Main releases typically are, but SR releases aren’t, or at least not right away. Last year we saw the event being put on the homepage after about 5 days.

As it appears, there were 95 bugs fixed for this release in the core of Eclipse.

Among others a somewhat older but high profile OS X bug is fixed involving a nasty NPE and an obscure one where Eclipse would actually delete code.

Furthermore the usual assortment of totally weird bugs where fixed, the ones even the most experienced developers have hardly any idea about what they could mean. Stuff like ClassCastException in Theme$1.propertyChange.

This time around the good people from the WTP project did not feel like posting about the SR2 event on their homepage. Fiddling with the handy bugzilla URLs revealed a list of 22 bugs that are likely to be fixed in WTP 3.7.2, the version that should be the one that’s bundled with Eclipse 4.5.2.

Among the highlights of bugs that WTP 3.7.2 fixed is a fix for the fact the pom.xml did not match a Manifest.fm. Most other fixes focused on solving null pointer exceptions. No less than 9 different ones of these were solved, including the dreaded NullPointerException in ParameterGuesser$VariableCollector.collect. Interesting to note is that all of these were reported via the automated error reporting that was introduced with Eclipse 4.5. Next to null pointer exceptions, a couple of array index out of bounds exceptions where fixed as well.

Following the trend, community reporting is even lower than last year. This year there’s really no reporting at all. But it has only been released today, so maybe a few outlets will pick it up in the following days.

It remains a fact, year after year, that SR releases apparently aren’t that exciting. But the lack of announcements about them and the silent releases of what should really be one of the most important products that the Eclipse organization delivers remains a curious thing.

Luckily the milestones for the next Eclipse, code named Neon (4.6), do get some more attention.