After applying the latest Debian testing (Jessie) updates, Eclipse started having issues. After trying several different solutions, I've arrived at a workaround that solves the problem. Hopefully this is only a temporary fix as this should really work 'out of the box'.

The first problem encountered was that Eclipse would hang while starting up. Looking at the error output from the command line, this was the culprit:

LogFilter.isLoggable threw a non-fatal unchecked exception as follows:
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.eclipse.core.internal.runtime.Log.isLoggable(Log.java:101)

The fix for this part of the problem was to temporarily rename the org.eclipse.core.resources directory in /.metadata/.plugins, launch Eclipse, close all open tabs and exit, then move the old org.eclipse.core.resources directory back into place. Thanks to Mohit for this post which helped resolve this initial symptom and made finding the fix possible.

So now Eclipse starts but was now spraying out those NullPointerExceptions. This has usually been an indicator that there was a problem with the SVN JavaHL interface. Running the JavaHL tests confirmed this. Even when after explicitly setting the library path, it still wouldn't work. So I resorted to a symlink solution:

cd /usr/lib
mkdir jni
cd jni
ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/jni/* .

Not an ideal solution, but it gets the job done until whatever package breakage that occurred gets corrected.

Update 9/11/2013

As expected this was a temporary solution. After updating to the latest Debian testing packages problems returned.

First was a nearly instant crash related to libsoup-2.4.so as reported here and here. This problem was resolved easily enough by adding -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=mozilla to eclipse.ini as recommended in those links.

However, there still remained the return of the original issue described earlier in the first part of this post. A bit more digging revealed that svn has been updated to 1.7.x which requires updating Subclipse from 1.6 to 1.8 which again resolved the issue.