Hello Debian Java Folks!
Recently I started to use your wonderful Debian packages of Eclipse. So I'd just like to give you some feedback from a user's point of view. I have a testing distribution here, with some few parts from unstable. I was using a binary Eclipse build downloaded from their website and installed to /usr/local. That was working quite fine with a J2SDK from Sun (installed via java-package). However I prefer to manage all my software with apt, so I decided to check out the Eclipse related Debian packages recently. First I was a bit worried, that the change might mess up all my existing workspaces. But everything worked fine after I installed the packages. I was particularly happy, that I could still install additional Eclipse plug-ins easily. I'm using the built-in update and configuration tools of Eclipse for that. Of course, in the long run I'd prefer to have some of those plug-ins available as Debian packages. (e.g. Web Standard Tools, PyDev, Subclipse, ...) I heard, there are ongoing efforts to package Eclipse plug-ins, but I haven't investigated that further. I'd just like to encourage anyone working on that to keep their work up. I think, having more Eclipse plug-ins in the Debian distribution would be appreciated by many other people, too. Now for some things which are not that perfect yet: When I first tried the newly installed Eclipse packages, they used kaffe as virtual machine. I have to say, that the whole Eclipse workspace seemed rather slowish, and used up a lot of memory. Could that be improved by using the native GCJ versions of the packages? I didn't check that out yet, since I encountered another problem when running Eclipse on kaffe: I tried to use the new language features introduced in Java 1.5 (or 5.0 if you want). The eclipse compiler seems to support that very well. But for using it, I needed the proper libraries on my classpath. So I tried to use /usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-sun as JRE for my Java projects in Eclipse. But this didn't work, since the compiler complained about something like "Could not find class java.lang.Object"! It seems to me, that you cannot properly use Java 1.5 libraries, when Eclipse is running in a VM not knowing about the new language features. Probably it's due to some changes in the reflection API. I worked around this problem by using Sun's J2SDK 1.5 to run Eclipse. Luckily you've made it very easy to do so: I just had to change some lines in /etc/eclipse/java_home or in ~/.eclipse/eclipserc. So now I'm using the Debian Eclipse packages with J2SDK 1.5. All the new language features are supported perfectly, and the overall performance seems much better. I hope you guys are not angry about that, but for me using Sun's proprietary Java VM is just the better solution. On the other hand, I do appreciate your efforts to promote free Java very much. I'll definitely give it another try from time to time. Does anyone know, if there is already a way to develop Java 1.5 applications with Eclipse running on a free Java VM? Is support for Java 1.5 planned in any of the free Java libraries? Probably it already works, and I'm just too stupid? Anyhow, thanks for Eclipse and all the other Java applications in Debian. Keep up good work! Regards, Michael Riedel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
