Description Stephan Herrmann 2011-02-19 12:22:34 EST

Steps (using SDK 3.7 M5):
- check out project org.eclipse.jdt.core
  (I assume any plug-in project with the following setting will do:
     compilers.p.build.source.library=2
  )
- add a source folder "contrib", do not update build.properties

The BundleErrorReporter will try to report:
  "contrib/ is not included in any "source.*" build entry"

However, while trying to report it will die with an NPE:

java.lang.NullPointerException
        at org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.builders.BuildErrorReporter.reportErrors(BuildErrorReporter.java:1068)
        at org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.builders.BuildErrorReporter.validate(BuildErrorReporter.java:164)
        at org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.builders.ErrorReporter.validateContent(ErrorReporter.java:127)
        at org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.builders.ManifestConsistencyChecker.validateBuildProperties(ManifestConsistencyChecker.java:316)
        at org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.builders.ManifestConsistencyChecker.validateProject(ManifestConsistencyChecker.java:231)
        at org.eclipse.pde.internal.core.builders.ManifestConsistencyChecker.build(ManifestConsistencyChecker.java:157)


Cause: report(..) will return null if the problem severity is IGNORED,
but reportErrors(..) does not catch this null but happily proceeds until ...


Naturally, this occurred while working on bug 186342 to support detecting
NPEs at compile time :)
In the future the return of report(..) should be declared as 
  "@Nullable IMarker"
which will cause marker.setAttribute(..) to be flagged as an error.
Simple as that.