Hi folks. As you may or may not know, I have a love/hate relationship with my IDE: Eclipse PDT. For times and times we get along well. But once every while it gets messed up, and it's a pain to straighten it out again. Or at least, it was.

Update Gone Bad

After today's update I kept getting errors like:

Subversive SVN Integration for the Mylyn Project (Optional) (Incubation)

(0.7.4.I20081001-1900) requires feature "org.eclipse.mylyn_feature (3.0.0)", or  compatible.
JST Web Core (2.0.301.v200806230800-7Q7AE7LEHhHeh0hQ7qz0VBC) requires plug-in  "org.eclipse.emf.ecore.xmi (2.3.0)", or equivalent.

java.lang.NullPointerException_

Rendering Eclipse useless. Forcing me to spend hours of manual dependency resolving in the minefield they call plugin manager (or do they?). The random crashes and automagic-selection of mirrors that give 404 errors, don't make it any less frustrating either.

With all the user-friendliness around us (Apple, Ubuntu, web 2.0) nowadays, I just can't get my head around this terrible mess.

Don't release updates when they have a bigger chance of breaking than fixing things.

Revert to Previous

And just when I reach the point where I'm starting to forget all of the good times me and my IDE have had, a little link finds me: "Revert to Previous".

OK.. This just might work. If I can go back in time, I could undo my updates, restoring Eclipse to a working, thus, awesome state.

Time Machine

Well let's see...

hm. So far so good.

And so I select a point in time that I want to revert to, and just click Finish.

Eclipse asks my permission to restart, let's me save some unfinished work, and voila. I'm back in business.

Bumpy Ride

Well that was one bumpy ride. But it will hopefully be my last, thanks to this feature.

Saved by the bell, Eclipse.. I had almost given up you.