Wednesday, November 1, 2006

“Cancel” Means “Cancel”

Okay, here's a nice, cute little behavior to start off ... so I forgot to turn off Build Automatically before I imported a sizeable project, and so it's stuck building (which, since I haven't set things up right yet, is doomed to failure anyway.) So I turn off Build Automatically. Silly me, I'm hoping (despite past experience) that this will make it stop building. So I click on the little progress bar button to have a look at the background tasks, and sure enough there's a “Building Workspace” and a “Refreshing Workspace.” I cancel both of them. Nothing happens, except that they both now have “(Cancelled)” in their names. Finally, I hope things will sort themselves out if I quit and start Eclipse again. So I do, but after the Eclipse window disappears, I'm confronted with this:


Nice, huh? It's waiting on a few cancelled operations to stop ... cancelling. Dammit, I wasn't kidding when I said “cancel.” And definitely not when I said “quit.”

So then it sits around like that for a while, the “building” progress bar empty and the “refreshing” one bouncing back and forth. A few minutes (?!) later, it finally disappears. So I try to start up Eclipse again, and ... it says the workspace is still in use. Yep, Java's still running. Had to kill it from the command line. (And, for reasons unclear, network usage was pegged at 100% until I killed it.)

So here it is: “Cancel” means “cancel.” I don't care what you're doing, but it'd better not take more than a few seconds not to be doing it anymore. If it really can't be cancelled, there should be no friggin' Cancel button to begin with. Have some respect for my time, for crying out loud.


Related bug reports



36 comments:

Anonymous said...

yes, i hate it. what's the point?

Tom Kirkpatrick said...

absol-fu**ing-lutely

Paul said...

Hey wow, 3 years on from your blog post and link to a bug report and... Eclipse is still full of this shit. Exactly the same thing is happening to me right now.

Anonymous said...

yeah this fuckin problem still exist. "cancel requested" ha? one more cup of beer was requested too eclipse! it takes too much time to become normal and there is a serious need for fix of this bullshit.

Neil Gaetano Lindberg said...

Would the next post please include the process, if there is a specific one, to cancel? I'm afraid of losing work. This stinks. How bout some word wrap too!? And CSS-like code styling! ;)

Anonymous said...

4 years late and this shit still going on. I found this https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=208750
so it looks like they are never going to try and fix this. They say its a case by case basis.

Bojan said...

+1
4 years later... still freezes. It is some kind of a core problem - probably needs rewrite.
Cancel requested... as if eclipse requests this from the dark force :)
I mean really - is canceling an operation so difficult? Whatever - leave me with inconsistent state, just stop the god d*mn process.

Anonymous said...

5 years

Anonymous said...

let's give them until 2015 to fix this and then switch to Netbeans!

Anonymous said...

Its 2011-12-19 and I'm still dealing with this sh**. I don't know how to stop that damn process and I'm nearly freaking out ...

Anonymous said...

Hi, it's 2012 now but the situation is the same. However, there are some areas where cancel works, for example... Text search. But I cannot mention more :)
But it is plugin dependent, as others said, not a central thing. Every plugin developer should pay attention to this.. Maybe they are working for deadlines and implementing Cancel operations have low priority - even for the first look it does not seem to be a hard task... Maybe they do not implement that to have vengeance on other plugin developers who pulls back THEIR work by not implementing cancel :)

Ferid said...

There should be some button to cancel the cancel request :P

Ferid said...

There should be some button to cancel the cancel request :P

f_mele said...

October, 22 2012. Same issue on Indigo.

Anonymous said...

6 years

dny said...

Its almost 2013 and still same problem :(

Anonymous said...

Project / Build automatically".
Is just a workaround to prevent this endless loop.

paskal007r said...

2013, ddss
(different date same sh*t)

paskal007r said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
UncleFegg said...

Still taking about 5 minutes for our complex build to stop...in fact it stops when the compile has finished :)

It's Aug 2013...Google sure are great.

Anonymous said...

and it still doesn't work; eclipse sucks. android sucks.

Saikat said...

And they say that Eclipse is the "best" IDE.
What a waste of time and energy and effort.
Half the time I am struggling restarting eclipse , cancelling tasks(which never cancels... and I dont know why it behaves like a retard).
I hate it but somehow bound to it...

Anonymous said...

The year is 2014, problem still persists...

Anonymous said...

Eclipse "luna" late september 2014
same fu*ing shit!

Unknown said...

Well!
Finally, this bug survived to 2015.
Maybe it can win the title of "oldest bug".

Anonymous said...

10/09/2015 the bug is still there... 2016 may be ?

Wade said...

Yup, 2016 and the cancel button on a build process is more like an undo button. Which means, if you're 99% done with a build, then hit cancel, instead of finishing in a few seconds had it gone on, it will take the entire amount of time it took to get to that point as it seems to try to uncopy all the resources back again to the project's folder. Nightmare. Cancel should simply be cancel...not undo. Plus, I didn't even ask it to build, I was simply adding some folders in my project. And yes, I agree we need a cancel button for the cancel process! :)

Anonymous said...

Feb 18th, 2016 and this still exists.
Pretty frustrating, any ideas on how to resolve this?

Anonymous said...

Kill the process

kernel-maker said...

January 23 2017!!! SAME SH***T! SAME OLD SH****T!!!!
W T F!!!, seriously thinking to change to netbeans ide!

Anonymous said...

March 2017

Anonymous said...

this still a true issue

Anonymous said...

its 19 feb, 2018....this stupid eclipse is still the same.....and this is truly a issue still......

its like, keep counting guys, nothings gonna happen.....

Anonymous said...

4 February 2019 and still got this annoying bug...
I hate Eclipse !

Anonymous said...

Well, it's July 2020, still the same.
10 years of this issue?

Anonymous said...

March, 2021.

Covid is still going on. Vaccination is in progress.
Nasa have plans to land the first woman on the Moon in just 3 years more.

Will this bug still be alive?
I don't know, maybe all humanity has been eated by next giant mutant virus from Mars... before this bug has been killed.