Mylyn 2.1 released
, September 28th, 2007The Mylyn Project hit another milestone today with the Mylyn 2.1 release, also available from the Eclipse Europa Fall Update download packages. In addition to streamlining key usability corners identified in 2.0, this release showcases some of the the great efforts of Mylyn’s three Google Summer of Code students:
- Balazs Brinkus improved the new user experience and provide the screenshot attachment tool
- Jevgeni Holodkov added the task and query import and export facilities
- Xiaoyang Guan extended the Mylyn Trac Connector to support wiki formatting
For the rest of the Mylyn team, this release symbolizes our having survived a user community growth spurt of orders of magnitude. Last June the Eclipse Packaging Project informed us that they would distribute Mylyn as part of three default Eclipse downloads. Our download numbers went from tens of thousands per month to the couple million that the Europa packages have already seen. Thankfully Rob Elves’ improvements to the performance and offline caching of the Task Editor made it possible for us to respond to over a thousand Bugzilla reports filed or commented on since the Mylyn 2.0 release. While 2.0 has held up very well, with the new feedback we have learned important lessons in making the tool more accessible to newcomers, some of which have already been incorporated into Mylyn 2.1. For the rest of the release cycle leading up to Eclipse Ganymede and Mylyn 3.0, we’ll continue innovating the Task-Focused UI to help you stay sane while managing the countless tasks that make up a typical workday.
September 28th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Great work guys! Congrats on another successful, on-time release!
September 29th, 2007 at 11:11 am
This is great news, Mik. I look forward to downloading the new version and trying it out.
Something to keep in mind, though is how well Mylyn integrates with large projects. My observation, and that of my colleagues, is that the larger a project gets, the slower Mylyn makes the IDE, to the point of needing to disable Mylyn. That’s too bad, because it’s the really large projects that need such support and integration.
Nonetheless, I’m welcome my new task-oriented overlords.
October 1st, 2007 at 9:47 am
Thanks Ian!
Robert, note that Mylyn’s performance is not related to workspace size. So if you’re seeing any performance degradation please file a bug, now matter how large your workspace is. I have just updated the corresponding Mylyn performance FAQ entry to be more clear on this.
> Nonetheless, I’m welcome my new task-oriented overlords.
He he, we are not your overloads, we are your servants, and the Eclipse Bugzilla is the best way to ring for service
October 16th, 2007 at 9:55 am
Mylyn sucks!
I don’t know how come this project becomes a core of 3.3. I just simply can’t disable it in 3.3, so I have to keep using eclipse 3.2.
October 16th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Nathan,
Mylyn is part of 3.3 because of community demand. We welcome all feedback on the tool, even if that just means sharing any frustrations that you have. But if you want us to do something about your opinion or problem we will need more information.
To disable Mylyn simply close the Task List, Mylyn will not do anything if you don’t use it. To disable the plug-ins entirely, use Help (menu) -> Software Update -> Manage Configuration. You can also disable Mylyn features individually.
To report feedback on the tool use either Help (menu) -> Report Bug or Enancement or one of the community support forums.
October 21st, 2007 at 9:50 pm
good….
December 5th, 2007 at 11:10 am
I’m with Nathan. Mylyn has made eclipse completely unusable for me. My computer freezes at 100% cpu whenever I do just about anything. And I can’t disable it with Manage Configuration - keep getting error messages.
Now I have to go through the extremely painful process of downgrading to 3.2.
As for reporting bugs through eclipse - haha funny joke. Would take me a day to get enough unfrozen periods to submit the bug report.
Looks like the mylyn coders come from the same school that gave us vista…
December 5th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Dear Fustrated: please refer to the corresponding FAQ entry. You simply need to uninstall dependent features first, if that’s too much trouble you can uninstall manually, and you always have the option of downloading Eclipse 3.3 without Mylyn.
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Mylyn_FAQ#Uninstall_troubleshooting
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
We are not aware of Mylyn bugs that make the computer freeze in the way you describe, but can help you troubleshoot your problem if you file a bug. I understand that you are frustrated, it will be easiest for us to help you if you describe the problem. While I’m curious as to what makes you think that we come from the same school that created Vista, other than the fact that you encountered a bug, one difference with Eclipse is that you have immediate and quick access to a developer community that can help you resolve such problems:
http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/bugs/
http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/community/
December 5th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Mik, the Vista comment was an intemperate and unfair remark - a consequence of my immense frustration. But by way of explanation: eclipse 3.2 worked fine for me, upgrading to 3.3 with mylyn included by default has caused no end of headaches. I have had exactly the same experience with Vista: XP worked fine, Vista is a nightmare.
Anyway, I strongly recommend inclusion of a switch that makes it trivial to uninstall mylyn. Having to hunt around forever to work out how to remove a feature that I never wanted in the first place is also frustrating. I have now removed mylyn and my machine has stopped playing up. I don’t know if it is mylyn’s fault or a problem with another plugin, but I do know that removing mylyn helps.
December 6th, 2007 at 11:40 am
I must concur. Mylyn was causing eclipse 3.3 to pin my CPU at 100% on Ubuntu 7.10 for a feature of which I have zero interest. Plugins should be unpluggable.
December 6th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Frustrated: if you do not use Mylyn it should not be doing anything. Without more informatino I can’t say what the bad interaction was in your case. There was one problem with a bad interaction with Subclipse that Mylyn now guards against, could you comment either here or on the bug whether you are using Subclipse?
200220: Eclipse stops responding due to bad interaction between Subclipse and task hyperlink detection
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=200220
starboard-leeward: as per my comments above, Mylyn is fully unpluggable. Also, if you could let us know any evidence that you had that Mylyn was responsible that would be great. It is critical to us that Mylyn not incurr *any* overhead when not used, and not incurr any noticable performance overhead when used (i.e. when you activate tasks). Whe have made additional improvements to ensure this for the upcoming Mylyn 2.2 (to be released December 19th). More informatino on the performance profile is at:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Mylyn_FAQ#What_is_Mylyn.27s_performance_profile.3F
December 31st, 2007 at 12:39 pm
Mylyn in Eclipse 3.3 is causing a heap of problem with a zillion error messages. Disabling it doesn’t work. It is truly frustrating.
December 31st, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Mark: As per my comments above, there are various ways to uninstall and disable it, including just deleting the plug-ins. The instructions are at:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Mylyn_FAQ#Uninstall_troubleshooting
I wish that both install and uninstall could be a single click, but that’s not currently possible in Eclipse due to how dependencies work.
In terms of the error messages you saw, please file a bug because we don’t know of any actual errors that result from having Mylyn installed (only warnings that are innocuous). You can also install the latest Mylyn 2.2, which ensures that none of those warnings appear.
http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/bugs/
http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/community/
Either way, I would appreciate that you follow up on a forum, on this blog, or with an email, because I would like to figure out how we can avoid others feeling this needless frustration.
February 13th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Thanks, guys for Mylyn 2.1! It’s fantastic work!
Very cool release!
February 14th, 2008 at 2:13 am
Hi,
I’m getting lot of issues with mylyn and eclipse just doesn’t respond.and i see lot of errors in the log as below :
!MESSAGE While loading class “org.eclipse.mylyn.internal.tasks.ui.WorkspaceAwareContextStore”, thread “Thread[main,6,main]” timed out waiting (5000ms) for thread “Thread[Worker-3,5,main]” to finish starting bundle “update@plugins/org.eclipse.mylyn.tasks.ui_2.1.0.v20070927-0900.jar [313]“. To avoid deadlock, thread “Thread[main,6,main]” is proceeding but “org.eclipse.mylyn.internal.tasks.ui.WorkspaceAwareContextStore” may not be fully initialized.
!STACK 0
org.osgi.framework.BundleException: State change in progress for bundle “update@plugins/org.eclipse.mylyn.tasks.ui_2.1.0.v20070927-0900.jar” by thread “Worker-3″.
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.AbstractBundle.beginStateChange(AbstractBundle.java:1141)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.AbstractBundle.start(AbstractBundle.java:258)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.util.SecureAction.start(SecureAction.java:400)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseLazyStarter.postFindLocalClass(EclipseLazyStarter.java:111)
I have to check disbaling all the mylyn pugins…
February 14th, 2008 at 7:31 am
This was bug:
188524: warnings on startup in Europa
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=188524
Note that this is just a warning and it was not necessarily the cause of the unresponsiveness that you were seeing. But if you get the latest Mylyn 2.2 release it should go away. We have also made some additional improvements related to this and startup performance that will be available in tonight’s weekly build.
http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/downloads/
April 7th, 2009 at 2:35 am
Still causing major performance probs in 3.4.2, particularly in GUI autocomplete. It is not until you start getting exceptions that you realise the it’s mylyn to blame. And it’s not that straightforward how to remove it. Pain in the neck. Does anyone really use this ****? Eclipse is getting sooooo bloated.
April 7th, 2009 at 6:51 am
Alastair, according Eclipse community surveys done by Evans Data Corporation around 1/3 of Eclipse users use Mylyn.
Any performance problems that you’re seeing of this sort sound like a bug or bad configuration in your environment. We are sorry for your frustration, but have not had this problem reported by others and will need more invormation to diagnose. Your two best pets are either to download the latest or to submit a support request with details:
* http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/downloads/
* http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/support/
June 12th, 2009 at 8:43 am
Mik: I’ve had the same problems with Mylyn (in Ganymede) causing exceptions and apparently slowness on Linux and Windows XP.
And I was unable to uninstall it despite repeated attempts. Perhaps I didn’t remove all the dependencies, but why should I have to guess what depends on Mylin? I finally uninstalled Eclipse, reinstalled the Classic. But that involved losing a lot of time.
As to your point of popularity, surveys are always susceptible to various design flaws (e.g., selecting people who would be likely to answer a certain way), so don’t rely on them solely, especially if they tell you what you want to hear.
E.g., look at the downloads of Galileo RC3: 7800 people downloaded the only Mylyn-free download (Classic), which is more than all the other configurations combined. That might indicate something (perhaps a desire for less bloat).
From what I’ve seen, Mylyn appears to be a pretty cool feature if you need it and are willing to invest the time to use it. But that doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone, and, given how easy it is to download and install plugins in Eclipse, unbundling would be the route I would vote for, FWIW. After all, one only installs once a year (per machine).
Also, keep in mind that the people who don’t want to use it, who haven’t configured it or touched it at all, just received it as part of a bundle, are unlikely to be motivated enough to grab all the information needed to file a useful bug report on the exceptions and especially the slowness.
August 26th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Larry, it will always be the case that Eclipse includes features that aren’t right for everyone but it’s important to include features out of the box that many people find useful. Presuming that any performance bug has now been fixed, people who don’t want to use Mylyn can simply not use it, as they would with many other features.
I understand your points about the limitations of surveys. However, taking a look at the Galileo downloads as you suggest now shows that people choose a package with Mylyn in it about 85% of the time.
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:03 pm
>Presuming that any performance bug has now been fixed,
It hasn’t.
In an up-to-date 3.5 install, I get massive pauses in code completion, Eclipse then helpfully points out that Mylyn is the source of the slowness. This is despite not having ever used Mylyn, or even being aware it was in the distribution. I can’t see any way to uninstall it sort of deleting the jars from the plugins directory.
Very irritating.
September 25th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Hi Adrian, that slowness is not actually caused by Mylyn. You will see that message if anything interrupts the proposal computation.
Please see “Why do I get an error message when using content assist?” in this FAQ entry.
November 14th, 2009 at 2:55 am
“Mylyn has made eclipse completely unusable for me. My computer freezes at 100% cpu whenever I do just about anything. And I can’t disable it with Manage Configuration - keep getting error messages.
Now I have to go through the extremely painful process of downgrading to 3.2.”
The FAQ should take care of the problems you are having. I was stumped at first but got everything up and running.