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.

Please see “Why do I get an error message when using content assist?” in this FAQ entry.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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/

I have to check disbaling all the mylyn pugins…