[Bug 123064] Re: Upgrade to Eclipse 3.4.2

pkt pktoss at gmail.com
Fri Apr 17 18:27:35 UTC 2009


Fwiw:

1) The statement that eclipse doesn't need packaging and it is trivial
to install standalone is imho *a joke*.
The fact is, eclipse *does* have dependencies on other stuff that is
installed via the package system
(by far the most painful of which is, of course, mozilla/xulrunner).

Packaging eclipse hopefully makes packagers responsible for making
sure the installed versions of these
dependencies are appropriate and won't cause problems (e.g., see the
current bugs in fedora/debian
where eclipse doesn't even start because the mozilla guys decided to
change their API once more.
Those are the kinds of problems that packaging is supposed to fix).

2) The hardest technical issue for packaging, is by far the eclipse
build system. My package released
in christmas (based on the fedora package) proved that it is indeed
possible to get something that works
(even with eclipse's new update/provisioning system, P2) but the size
of packaging scripts and the number
of patches that had to be applied to get things to work *almost*
reasonably, shows this path is unfortunately
unmaintainable in the long run. Even the Fedora/Redhat guys seem to be
concerned with that issue.

The linuxdistros eclipse project is working on a saner build system
for eclipse (called eclipse-build)
and rockwalrus has worked on a slightly different build system too
(that I like a bit better). If you are
really interested in seeing recent eclipse in shape for debian/ubuntu
and are reasonably well versed
in java/ant, you should really consider helping those efforts.

There are also policy issues imho: E.g., should the osgi framework
(equinox) be provided separately?
(it is already used standalone by a few people). What should we do
with the shared libraries?

Other issues are simple but tedious stuff like packaging and pushing
all the dependencies
in a form that are usable by eclipse (at least an OSGified Manifest.MF).

I have filed bugs for lots of the subtasks I could think of in
https://bugs.launchpad.net/eclipse-debian
My source has also been public from the beginning and is in a
gitorious repository (eclipse-debian)*
rockwalrus also has the eclipse-ubuntu effort.

So, currently it seems nobody has the needed free time (I know I
don't) to finish the job. But if everyone
contributing complaints to this bug had invested a few hours to solve
one of the documented subproblems,
eclipse would be pretty ok by now ;)

*git://gitorious.org/eclipse-debian/mainline.git

-- 
Upgrade to Eclipse 3.4.2
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/123064
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