Description Elliotte Rusty Harold 2005-10-01 05:01:37 EDT

I recently spent several hours struggling with a failure to be able to run
anything  in two projects that depended one each other. I kept =getting
NoClassDefFoundErrors. Very frustrating. I eventually realized that Eclipse was
not actually compiling my classes into the bin directory (or anywhere else) and
that's why I couldn't run. It took a couple more hours to track this down to the
preference for "Build Path problems" specifically "Abort Build when errors
occur" and Incomplete path and circular dependencies being classified as errors.
Changing these to warnings fixed the problems. 

I am not sure whether these conditions should be warnings or errors by default.
However, I am sure that when I clean a project or build it, and it can't be
built due to one of these problems, that a dialog should be immediately shown to
the user telling them:

1. that the build failed
2. why it failed

This did not happen. The build failed silently, and the only indication I had
that it failed was that I didn't see the usual progress dialog telling me the
build was ongoing. Maybe there was a relevant message in the Tasks or Problems
view somewhere.  However, neither of these is displayed by default. Furthermore,
I did look through these pretty carefully, and I didn't find any such message.
If there was a message indicating the problem it was either too obscure or too
hidden amongst other problems for me to recognize.