Updating Eclipse

Markus Koschany apo at gambaru.de
Fri Jan 9 19:21:07 UTC 2015


Hi Pascal,

On 09.01.2015 19:43, Pascal Rapicault wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> My name is Pascal Rapicault. I'm a long time committer on the Eclipse
> platform, and I've recently been tasked by Ericsson to:
> 1 - bring new versions of Eclipse to debian
> 2 - make sure the experience of using eclipse on debian is good (from an
> installation pov)
> 3 - make sure the user can get multiple versions of Eclipse installed at
> the same time but not all merged (e.g. IDE for C/C++, IDE for Java, etc.)
> 4 - find a way to streamline the push of Eclipse to debian

Thank your for your interest in Eclipse and the state of Java packages
in Debian. I suggest we continue this discussion on debian-java since
this is the official list to discuss Java related development for
Debian. pkg-java-maintainers is more appropriate when we deal with
specific bug reports.

> > I recently worked on a mechanism that creates debian packages from an
> eclipse distro as a single package (all the jars and other files are in
> one package) and is also able to collect the dependencies on native
> packages. This works quite well since it makes it easy for the users to
> get a functional starting point (IDE for Java, IDE for C/C++) that they
> can customize, and allows multiple IDEs to be installed separately.
> 
> Now a couple questions:
> - Would the package I describe above be suitable to be made available in
> the main debian repo? (I assume no, but I may as well check :))
> - What are the reasons why Eclipse is no longer updated, technical,
> political, volunteers?
> - What are the requirements to package Eclipse for debian?
> - What are the most "painful" aspects of this process?

The main reason why Eclipse has not been updated in a while is lack of
volunteers. The approach to bundle all jars in one package is tempting
but it's not the Debian way of doing things. You would have to make sure
that all dependencies are packaged separately or that existing
dependencies are updated in lock step and that this process does not
break other packages which depend on them. We have to make sure that
everything can be built from source. There are also several plugins for
Eclipse which have to be updated as well.

The current version is old but functional. At least this is my user
experience. It is quite easy to install Eclipse on Debian but you are
right that a newer version would be much appreciated. I suggest you look
at the current packaging to get an idea of the current work flow.
There are several documents for new maintainers which might be of
interest for you listed on this page.

https://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers

We also have some guidelines for Java packages.

https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/java-policy/

If you have specific packaging questions, always feel free to ask them
on debian-java.

Regards,

Markus




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