Bug#342341: eclipse: too many unneeded dependencies

[Billy Biggs]

On 10-Dec-05, at 8:53 AM, Erwan David wrote:

>> The gnome libraries are needed for SWT, for example
>> org.eclipse.swt.program.Program to get informations about the mine
>> type and icons etc. for a given file.
>
> False, eclipse and swt work perfectly without gnome.

   Hi Erwan, I'm an SWT developer.

   The Program library is so that in Eclipse, when you right click
on a file and go "Open With > System Editor", it will open the
same application that Nautilus would (.txt -> gedit, or whatever).
As well, .C files will show the right icon the same as nautilus.
Of course Eclipse works fine without this capability, but the
feature won't work, and other SWT applications may depend on being
able to get these icons and runnables (imagine writing a file
browser in SWT!).  So, at some point the dependency must be stated
or moved to be a "Recommends:".

>> And the dependency to mozila-broser is needed for the SWT Browser  
>> widget. You
>> should be able to use firefox instead, but nevertheless a browser  
>> is needed.
>
> eclipse works without a browser installed. You put restrictions on  
> its use...

   Eclipse uses an embedded browser in many places.  The Help contents
for example is an embedded Mozilla instance.  If Mozilla is not found
or not available, often there are fallbacks in Eclipse (you'll see some
crappy white background with some icons instead of the full Intro), but
some other Eclipse plugins _do_ depend on being able to embed mozilla.
Consider the Eclipse web development plugins.  Even the Javadoc view in
Eclipse is an embedded Mozilla browser.

> Its more a matter of policy : you as maintainer put arbitrary  
> restrictions on the use of the software.
>
>> I tend to tag the report as WONTFIX, but wait on an opinion from  
>> Michael Koch.
>
> Do debian policy allow maintainers to include dependencies which  
> are not
> upstream ?
>
> I do not want to use gnome, f I follow you I should stop using  
> debian ?

   If we (Eclipse) could make these hard dependencies, I think we  
would.  We
have a horrible time trying to deal with distributions that don't  
provide
GNOME or Mozilla embedding as part of the standard platform.  Please
consider how hard it is to ship software under Linux currently where  
we have
to try and ensure we don't _completely_ die when Mozilla/GNOME aren't
available.

   -Billy