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Hiatus + Eclipse’s Magical Identifiers

I’m back after a brief hiatus (vacation/work). During my “hiatus”, I attended the ACM World Finals. It was cool to see a lot of Eclipse usage amongst students:

During the competition I did some informal survey’s of students to see their Eclipse usage and found that CDT usage was unusually high (shenanigans!) amongst students who use Eclipse: ~75%. In general, it seems about a fourth of the students use Eclipse for general development (just about zero use PDE, sorry Wassim).

As for an Eclipse annoyance, I was messing with global installhandlers recently to come across the magical identifier problem. To use a global installhandler, you need to reference one via id (see docs) I think I tried about five different combinations of id’s until I just debugged the code to find what was going wrong (docs didn’t make it clear what to put for the id). For future reference, the identifier is made up of the plugin id and id of the installhandler combined.