Eclipse: Update Manager Needs Update!

Eclipse Update Manager is really a special piece of software... I have blogged before about my battle, and here is another one.

We have a simple Eclipse plugin (created by xtext to provide an editor for our DSL, but actually this doesn't matter). I have a particular version (let's say 1.0.0) of that installed in my Eclipse 3.5.1. Now I want to upgrade to 1.1.0, but unfortunately the feature id has changed, so I need to uninstall my 1.0.0 version prior to installing the new one.

But... when I try to uninstall this plugin Eclipse tells me that it is "Calculating requirements and dependencies". To do so, Eclipse downloads a lot of stuff, including Eclipse features, mylyn, and much more. Seems to be half the internet which takes while. And then, about 15 min later, Eclipse tells me that it could not find a download site for some weird mozilla plugin.

Hello? What's that? I want to uninstall a plugin and Eclipse downloads tons of jars only to tell me that one is missing and it couldn't uninstall? Gosh!

After some googling, I found a trick to force Eclipse to just do what I want:

1. In Eclipse Preferences, on Install/Update > Available Software Sites page, export all sites to your filesystem.
2. Then remove all update sites and press OK.
3. Now uninstall the plugin -- for me, it just worked like a charm.
4. After restarting Eclipse, open Install/Update > Available Software Sites again and import the previously exported update sites.

That's it. Maybe just pulling the network cable would have worked, too... Oh boy.