One day effort for unknown vm crach of Eclipse during Subclipse installation

WTF,

It took me one day to get the problem fixed. The solution is so simple!

I setup Eclipse at my new laptop. As usual, i also installed the Subclipse plugin. By right it should work properly. Well, when i tried to create a new remote source repository using Subclipse Perspective in Eclipse, Eclipse just quitted suddenly followed by a prompt saying that it is some kind of memory crash.

Also, there is an error log file generated each time Eclipse exited. However the message is so so not comprehensive.

Here's the message:

## An unexpected error has been detected by Java Runtime Environment:
## EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005) at pc=0x3b397bfc,
pid=3824, id=5160
## Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (10.0-b22 mixed mode
windows-x86)
# Problematic frame:# C [libapr-1.dll+0x7bfc]
## If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit:
# http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport/crash.jsp
# The crash happened outside the Java Virtual Machine in native code.
# See problematic frame for where to report the bug.

With this only clue, i kept Googling for the whole day and still did not get the problem fixed! How frustated was i!

Besides trying out the solutions found online, I also tried to tackle the problem by doing a few times of trial and error, which is actually install-uninstall this kind of stuff.

We really got to be patient enough when dealing with this kind of problem.

Yet, the problems stayed. All the tries did not bring positive outcome.

Office hour ended. Today i did nothing but just configuring stupid Subversion on Eclipse. Boss, please don't get mad.

I started over the puzzle solving game again at home after coming back from dinner.

With calm mind, and of course enough of rest, i found the answer within an hour!

I came across this article online:

http://subclipse.tigris.org/faq.html#win32-crash

Here's the excerpt:

As soon as I do something with Subclipse on Windows, Eclipse just
crashes. Why does this happen?


This is a fairly recent problem that is caused by a DLL incompatibility. Subversion uses a library called APR or the Apache Portable Runtime. This library has a component called APR-ICONV which is used for translating characters in path and file names to/from UTF8 and the local character set. The release of Apache 2.2 brought with it new releases of APR and APR-ICONV and these are not binary compatible with previous releases.

Subclipse ships with the Apache 2.0 version of these libraries. This crash
occurs if you install an application that installs the Apache 2.2 version of
these libraries AND ALSO sets the APR_ICONV_PATH environment variable to a path that contains the Apache 2.2 version of the APR-ICONV .so objects.


The fix is actually simple. Change the name of the environment variable to APR_ICONV1_PATH. The Apache 2.2 library will look for this environment variable name first, and only fallback to the older name if it is not found. You can safely have an APR_ICONV_PATH environment variable pointing to the Apache 2.0 version of these libraries and the APR_ICONV1_PATH environment variable pointing to the Apache 2.2 version. Subversion 1.5 has resolved this problem by discontinuing the use of APR-ICONV. Instead, Subversion will use translation routines that are provided by the Windows operating system.

So, i uninstalled the Subversion Server built against Apache 2.2 and replaced it with the one built against Apache 2.0.

Eclipse looks fine now.

Finally!