FC4 - Eclipse problem

[Andrew Overholt]

Hi,

On Sun, 2006-01-08 at 13:41 -0800, Daniel B. Thurman wrote:
> Now, I updated Eclipse port v3.1.1 on FC4 and *knock-knock on wood* it
> runs however - all the stuff I downloaded (updates) were stripped and the
> features (as WST) was stripped.  So expect a FULL NEW installation!

This is really surprising.  The things that you install via the update
manager are put into ~/.eclipse.   Perhaps that directory was (re)moved?

> It appears the fedora-port somehow prevents these new 'features'

It's not a "fedora-port".  We are re-compiling the Eclipse SDK just as
they do upstream.  Then we natively-compile the bytecode.  If you are
running under gij, you get the native .sos.  If you are running with
another JRE, you get the bytecode.  It's that simple.  I think the
problems that you are experiencing are related to the fact that our
Eclipse packages are laid out on the file system differently than if you
were to download the .zip for Windows.  We follow JPackage conventions
to allow for multi-user installations.

> from being enabled.  Seems that Eclipse under Fedora is now controlled
> by Fedora and we are at the mercy of Fedora developers to come through
> for us and we cannot simply use Eclipse.org's version unless you install
> it completely standalone in the /usr/local directory as I have.

Haha.  This is not true.  You are not at our "mercy" :).  I am happy
that you are trying out WTP and I greatly appreciate your attempts and
feedback.  Hopefully we can work things out so that others can benefit
from your WTP testing.

> This fedora-port excercise seems to be an attempt to stray from
> the original Eclipse.org source all in the name of trying to nativetize
> (non-bytecode) Eclipse - and I fear that you can no longer expect to easily
> download desired eclipse feature files from the Eclipse.org source and expect
> it to run/work as is without jumping through hoops to get these features
> to work 'the fedora way'.  I hope that my fears are unfounded...

We're not attempting to "stray from the original Eclipse.org source" at
all.  We have some patches, yes, but 99% of them have bugs attached to
them upstream at http://bugs.eclipse.org.  You can see our specfile and
patches here:

http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/devel/eclipse/

When you install something using the update manager, it is downloaded as
they provide it as bytecode.  There is no way for the system to know
that you want it to be natively-compiled, so it is run interpreted by
gij.  If you have issues with such plugins, then they are perhaps class
library (or, less likely, interpreter) bugs and it would be great if you
could file them.

> At this time, there is no possible way for me to activate the wst 1.0 feature
> under Fedora's Eclipse 3.1.1 native port so that means I cannot get the J2EE
> features to work at all.

That is too bad.  Like I said in another mail, I can't test every
possible plugin set/configuration and it would be great if you could
help work through these WTP issues.

> I wonder where to go to find out what the heck the fedora-eclipse plans are
> and what exactly what we can do or cannot not do with their native porting of
> of eclipse and how to incorporate any eclipse.org features under their port.

What do you mean by "plans"?  If you for plugins, my plan (there's
nothing official) is to continue with our work (well, that of Ben
Konrath) to make packaging plugins dead simple so that we can get lots
of contributors of plugins to Fedora Extras.  For plugins that aren't
packaged, the update manager should be used to install things into
~/.eclipse.  I would love to hear about any bugs found with this
procedure.

> Seems the places go to so far are: fedora-java newsgroup (which is almost
> inactive or a very slow newsgroup), eclipse.org's newsgroups and just maybe
> the jpackage's "newsgroup" if there is one.

fedora-devel-java-list is active and the best place to discuss these
issues.

Andrew