Description Duong Nguyen 2003-06-18 13:37:59 EDT

After a user uninstall a product and relaunch Eclipse, an error message would 
be displayed indicating that Eclipse was not able to restore certain views or 
perspectives.

Although I understand that Eclipse is trying to restore (based on the 
stale .metadata info) a view or perspective in a plugin that was uninstalled, 
it would appear to the end-user that the uninstall was not clean or is 
incomplete.

The current error dialog does display valid errors in some cases but in the 
case of an uninstall, it is mis-leading to the user. 

I'm not sure what the solution should be but here are some of my suggestions:

a) provide a more informative message telling the user that the problem is 
probably caused due the fact that the plugin was uninstalled.

b) may be it is possible for Eclipse to detect that there was an uninstall and 
prevent these types of errors from being displayed.

c) provide a way to clean up the .metadata (eg. similar to the -initialize 
switch that will clean up silently) that can be called when a product is 
uninstalling.

d) the introduction of the update manager improved the installation of third 
party plugins and features, we need something similar for uninstall.