The Marketplace Client project is facing an issue with its Photon release due to bug 536385 [1], and would like to ask for a respin of the Simultaneous Release repository to provide a fix.
Due to this bug, the Marketplace Client fails to open for users that have their Eclipse Photon installed into a path that contains spaces - or more accurately, whose configuration area path contains spaces.
This includes users who
- rename their Eclipse directory to something like "Eclipse Photon"
- install Eclipse under a path that has spaces, e.g. "/Users/john/My Projects/eclipse"
- use the "-configuration" option to set the config area to something with spaces in it
It does not include installations to read-only locations with spaces, e.g. "C:\Program Files\eclipse", because in that case, Eclipse will use a writeable overlay directory in $HOME/.eclipse; so unless $HOME also contains spaces, this is safe. Overall, it's
hard to estimate the percentage of our users affected by this, but there is some traffic on the bug and on several duplicates.
I've already published an MPC update with a fix to our release update site at
http://download.eclipse.org/mpc/photon and users confirmed that it fixed the issue.
I'm asking for this respin, because this is obviously a very bad user experience for those affected, and MPC is an essential part of Eclipse's plug-in ecosystem. And secondly, with the way the packages are built, I can't push out an MPC update that would get
picked up by "Check for updates", so users don't have any easy recourse to get the fix and I can't think of a "milder" solution to roll out this fix effectively.
Some technical details about the bug and the fix:
The bug is caused by translating the configuration area URL to a URI without guarding against unescaped characters. It was introduced by the fix for bug 536414 [2], which was detected in RC2 and fixed for RC3. The fix for the respin-bug 536385 solves the encoding
problem and also guards the whole non-essential block against any exceptions. The complete changes between the Photon release and the update can be seen in [3], the fix itself is in [4].
I would appreciate if you would approve this respin request and bring it before the Planning Council.
Best regards,
Carsten Reckord