Hi Niels, thanks for your explanation of the SWT and Eclipse relationships.
Your observations are correct, swt-gtk and eclipse both ship their own copy of swt. There is a historical/practical reason for this, which we unfortunately have not been able to fix. The issue is that eclipse is sometimes a very difficult package to maintain, which have left it RC-buggy and out of testing for months at a time. Even now, eclipse has finally migrated to testing after 4 months[1]. What you don't see on the PTS anymore was that eclipse was royally broken all of 2009 and possibly most of 2008 as well. Compare that to swt-gtk which has been in testing for the past 4 years or so. Hench it is much easier for maintainers to use swt-gtk as it is usually faster updated and hardly ever RC-buggy (at least, compared to eclipse).
I agree with this, eclipse is a huge beast and having swt-gtk for practical reasons makes sense. So I tried to approach the problem from the other side and updated eclipse build to not compile its own SWT but use the one we already have in libswt-gtk-*. So far everything works smoothly, including for example web browser integration. This way we get the best of both worlds - only one copy of swt in the system and maintainers still have a package that is easier to handle and usable even in case that eclipse becomes broken again anytime in the future. I pushed my changes to the git repos[1][2], I think it is not so big that it deserves a new upload of eclipse on its own, so I will not send any RFS for now, waiting for some bigger update. Regards, Jakub [1] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-java/swt-gtk.git;a=commit;h=63117c4f32da3238d9801ddae2627ad60f2e14a1 [2] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-java/eclipse.git;a=commit;h=0c33b0e9288abfc0cdcad52ea17dbbebd98fb102 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
