Netbeans hates Windows
July 14th, 2009
Most ror developers work on Mac or Linux systems. But I’m a Windows user. Not because I have any allegiance to Microsoft but because in my career my clients have been primarily Windows based.
For the most part, I’ve been able to find workarounds and have escaped unscathed from platform issues. But Netbeans has let me down… again.
Netbeans 6.5 gave me grief when trying to use the debugger. You can read about it here. Now, Netbeans 6.7 is giving me trouble checking out my project from subversion. It doesn’t seem to recognize the main project folder and the directory structure is wonky.
After much experimentation and swearing, I bypassed the IDE and instead tried to checkout via the Dos prompt. This results in a unhelpful error message that disguises the root of the problem.
svn: Your .svn/tmp directory may be missing or corrupt; run 'svn cleanup' and try again svn: Can't open file "long filename": The system cannot find the path specified.
Subversion libraries use relative paths. This is a problem on windows since it only supports path names under the 255 char limit. So, if you are trying to check out a project with a deep directory structure or perhaps you like your folder and file names to be *very* descriptive, you’ll run across an error like the one above.
Yes, this is a limitation of the file system but why can’t Netbeans feed subversion an absolute path when running svn commands instead of a relative path? Then I wouldn’t be wasting my precious dev time on config issues. Arg!
The work around is to use TortoiseSVN on Windows since it feeds subversion absolute paths.
*whew* Another bullet dodged. It’s long passed time to install Linux…
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1. djcp | July 14th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Ugh. That’s a sucky one.
We could set you up a VMWare ubuntu instance to play around with. . . jaunty has netbeans 6.5, and a newer version is (probably) just a backport away. Then you could see if netbeans/ubuntu is satisfactory and maybe make a dual-boot so you can run at native speeds.
It’s a thought.
2. lianaleahy | July 15th, 2009 at 10:29 am
TortoiseSVN ran for about a half hour (it’s a large project) and then died with this error:
“Could not read chunk delimiter: Secure connection truncated”
The message boards say that the sever side is generating the error and trying again picks up where it dropped the connection.
Cross your fingers for me.
3. lianaleahy | July 28th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
By the way, the debugger issue that I ran into in version 6.5 still exists in 6.7.
The solution is to add the line below to the end of netbeans_default_options parameter string in the netbeans.conf file (located in the etc directory)
-J-Dorg.netbeans.modules.ruby.debugger.timeout=30