I Love Obscure Error Messages

Obscure error messages are delightful. Like this one. It comes from Eclipse, my Java IDE of choice (well, not my choice really, but I digress...). So today I fire it up and get this obscure error message. Fortunately, the problem is really clear once you look at the log file it points you to:

!SESSION 2009-01-16 11:01:58.448 -----------------------------------------------
eclipse.buildId=
java.version=1.6.0_07
java.vendor=Sun Microsystems Inc.
BootLoader constants: OS=linux, ARCH=x86, WS=gtk, NL=en_US
Command-line arguments: -os linux -ws gtk -arch x86

!ENTRY org.eclipse.equinox.app 0 0 2009-01-16 11:01:59.038
!MESSAGE Product could not be found.

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 4 0 2009-01-16 11:01:59.084
!MESSAGE Application error
!STACK 1
java.lang.RuntimeException: No application id has been found.
at org.eclipse.equinox.internal.app.EclipseAppContainer.startDefaultApp(EclipseAppContainer.java:236)
at org.eclipse.equinox.internal.app.MainApplicationLauncher.run(MainApplicationLauncher.java:29)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.runApplication(EclipseAppLauncher.java:110)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseAppLauncher.start(EclipseAppLauncher.java:79)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:382)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter.run(EclipseStarter.java:179)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.invokeFramework(Main.java:549)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.basicRun(Main.java:504)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.run(Main.java:1236)

Yes, that was sarcasm you heard there.

To make a long, painful story short, after trolling around on the interwebs, I found the answer lies in Eclipse's config.ini file. For whatever reason, and I have no idea what that reason is, after using Eclipse since June, my config file got mysteriously corrupted. The attribute eclipse.product had a blank value. Apparently it's supposed to either have the value org.eclipse.sdk.ide or (in my case) org.eclipse.platform.ide, depending on which version of Eclipse you have installed. Once I set eclipse.product=org.eclipse.platform.ide in the config.ini file, Eclipse started up without complaint.

I hope that this sad tale may help someone in the future. Perhaps even myself, should it happen again!