Eclipse is stagnating

[Onkar Shinde]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Oli Warner <oli at thepcspy.com> wrote:
> Jaunty is shipping Eclipse version 3.2. That's about two years old -- a
> massive amount of time -- and since then there have been innumerable fixes.
> There has been a bug calling for its upgrade since 3.3 came out 20-something
> months ago. That bug has since gone through versions 3.4, 3.4.1 and now
> 3.4.2.
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eclipse/+bug/123064
>
> If this were an insignificant and very niche tool, but it's not; Eclipse
> earns four stars in the popularity contest (only beaten by the Python
> runtimes for obvious reasons).
>
> The community appears to be failing at getting this packaged. People try,
> run into build issues and quit. Over and over again. So is there any way we
> can elevate this issue before we start getting laughed at? Ideally somebody
> from Canonical would have a little chat with somebody from Sun and we'd
> magically be at a point where the community can maintain the build
> process...
>

Why would Sun want to do anything about Eclipse? They are doing good
job at maintaining their own IDE (netbeans) in Ubuntu.

Eclipse has become a mammoth. If any new maintainer tries to touch it,
it is going to be pain. We (Ubuntu community) are already short of
good java packagers. Of those we have I believe none have any
experience with Eclipse packaging.
The people who are responsible for Eclipse in Debian are missing in
action (from my understanding). I will be happy if proven wrong.

So this has really become a deadlock. If canonical does anything about
(as in hiring someone for six moths to get the package in good shape),
that will be great.


Onkar