[news.eclipse.platform.rcp] Loading Image Resources (Linux)

["Markus Franz" <markus.franz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

i stumbled upon a rather curious problem trying to persuade our 
RCP-application (eclipse 3.3.2 based) to run under Linux. All in all the 
application works rather well, but we have a lot of images (mostly icons, 
but also some background images for views) which have to be available inside 
the application. We use a ImageRegistry to store ImageDescriptors for keys. 
The key=value pairs (where a value is the path [fileName] of an image 
resource relative to a general image path [iconFolder]) are stored in a 
propertie file. As the application starts, the properties are stored and we 
are filling the image registry using the stored key/value pairs as follows:


        Bundle bundle = plugin.getBundle();
        Path path = new Path(this.iconFolder + fileName);
        URL url = FileLocator.find(bundle, path, Collections.EMPTY_MAP);
        if (url != null) {
            ImageDescriptor desc = ImageDescriptor.createFromURL(url);
            this.registry.put(key, desc);
         }


This works perfectly well under Windows and also for about 60% of the images 
under Linux. However for about 40% the URL returned by FileLocator.find(...) 
is null. The affected vs. unaffected files of this problem do not display 
any obvious differences (although there are several directories, there are 
files in every directory that can or cannot be opened this way). I have 
checked all the obvious possibilities (permissions, special filenames, etc.) 
without success. It gets even weirder:

In the original properties file i considered two entries:

key1=pathToIcon1 //works
key2=pathToIcon2 //does NOT work

I changed that to:

key1=pathToIcon1 //works
key2=pathToIcon1 //works too

So i thought the problem might be with the image file Icon2, but then i 
checked:

key1=pathToIcon2 //works (!)
key2=pathToIcon1 //works too

At last the combination

key1=pathToIcon2 //works
key2=pathToIcon2 //does NOT work

So i am out of ideas. I debugged the find(...)  method of RCP to find out 
why it returned a "null" URL and got up to the JDK method File.exists() 
which uses the current FileSystem (UnixFileSystem or so) to check if a File 
is hidden or nonexistent and returns false for the affected files (although 
they DO exist as i showed with the example above).

Oh by the way i run Ubuntu 7.10 (ext3 fs)  in a VirtualBox environment under 
Windows Vista, but this not the problem, as my old trusty not-virtualized 
Suse 9.3 (reiserfs) on my Notebook with a much older version of our software 
(same icon-filenames but different icons) and eclipse 3.2 displays the same 
behaviour (at least where those images are concerned).

Any ideas out there?
Regards

Markus