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 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
