Eclipse et. al. fail to build from source

[Thufir]

I don't understand why Eclipse (and Netbeans, and Tomcat) sucks so badly 
on Linux in general and Ubuntu specifically in relation to package 
management.  It seems that to install any of these apps it's best to 
download binaries outside of a package manager, which is a sorry state of 
affairs.

Apparently:

"Replace occurances of default-java with java-6-openjdk. Fixes FTBFS."
http://www.mail-archive.com/karmic-changes@lists.ubuntu.com/msg03735.html


That sounds like a kludge, and a bad one.  So, when Java 7 comes out, 
what then?  I suppose, as a user, I could care less so long as it works...


-Thufir