man-di

Yes. It’s true. Even Eclipse hackers can be funny. Read more in this bug report.

Thanks to the help of many people we were able to upload new Eclipse packages into the Debian archive. As they include some new binary packages it went into the NEW queue. In the next days ftp-master will review and hopefully approve it. This will be big step forward for the Debian Java maintainers as it adds one of the most requested Java applications to the archive.

I uploaded a new version of Eclipse (3.1-10) to my repository. This now features a working internal help system and the packages are now built for amd64 too. The following source lines are for installing the Debian packages via apt-get:

# i386

deb http://www.backports.org/~mkoch/unstable/ ./

# amd64

deb http://www.backports.org/~mkoch/unstable-amd64/ ./

# powerpc

deb http://www.backports.org/~mkoch/unstable-powerpc/ ./

# source

deb-src http://www.backports.org/~mkoch/unstable/ ./

The last problem before its possible to upload this to contrib is the mess with the SWT packages in Debian and the ones built by my Eclipse packages. I’m working in this together with Shaun and will hopefully resolve this soon.

The reasons why its only possible to upload to contrib is that the packages that eclipse depend on, libtomcat5-java and liblucene-java, are in contrib.
When these are move to main there is no reason not to upload Eclipse to main too.

After a long time I got around to release a new version of gcjwebplugin with some important bug fixes to work with more applets. Among other things linkage of Glib, parsing of applet parameters and some segfaults got fixed. Packages for Debian unstable will be in after next dinstall run. Have fun with this new version.

Another revision of the eclispe debian packages got uploaded. They fix a whole bunch of problems including powerpc support.

As usual they can be fetched for i386 via

deb http://www.backports.org/~mkoch/unstable/ ./

for powerpc via

deb http://www.backports.org/~mkoch/unstable-powerpc/ ./

and the sources via

deb-src http://www.backports.org/~mkoch/unstable/ ./

These packages are for Debian unstable (also known as SID). They don’t work on current Debian testing (also known as Etch).

As always have fun with these packages and report anything related to them to me.

Thanks to the numerous people who gave feedback on the last upload I was able to do much fixes to the Eclipse Debian packages. They got improved very much. The most shiny feature is the powerpc support support with pre-compiled jars for GCJ 4.0.

The packages can be fetched via apt-get with the following lines in your sources.list:

For i386 packages:

deb http://www.backports.org/~mkoch/unstable/ ./

For powepc packages:

deb http://www.backports.org/~mkoch/unstable-powerpc/ ./

For source packgages:

deb-src http://www.backports.org/~mkoch/unstable/ ./

Please test this version of the Debian packages and give feedback to me.

BTW: If you have problems starting up Eclipse please try to remove/rename the

.eclipse

directory in your home directory.

After a long time I got around to do some hacking on the Eclipse 3.1 packages for Debian. I uploaded them and they can be fetched with the following lines in your sources.list:

deb http://www.backports.org/~mkoch/unstable/ ./

deb-src http://www.backports.org/~mkoch/unstable/ ./

The binary packages are built against the new ant and cairo packages. The internal help system of Eclipse doesn’t work yet as this needs libtomcat5-java which is not in unstable at the time of this writing.

This revision is the first that provides precompiled native jars for GCJ 4.0. Its the begginning to make Eclipse a fully integrated IDE using a completly free toolchain. Kaffe and other free runtimes and proprietary runtimes are supported too.

Please the packages and report back all issues you find back to me. Don’t write bug reports for the Debian BTS.

Have fun with the new packages.

I updated my Eclipse Debian packages for unstable to version 3.1 RC4. This should be nearly identical to the upcoming final release of it. I needed to change the versioning scheme to make them work with the Debian archive software. I also did some fixes inspired from feedback I got from the last upload. Thanks to all the people that gave feedback.

I have uploaded some experimental Eclipse Debian packages to this location. Sorry, no apt-get lines yet. They are targetted for Debian unstable. Native compilation of jars for GCJ 4.0 is disabled for the moment because it takes too long on my slow machine. It will be enabled in an upcoming version of the packages. Please test them and report all bugs you find to me. Have fun.

Yesterday evening Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (codename “Sarge”) got released. Thanks to all who helped with the release. It took a long time but finally did it.

The Free Java support in this release of Debian is much better then before. It contains a recent version of kaffe which works pretty flawlessly with much applictions. Its even possible to run the Apache Tomcat version included in Sarge just fine (with the exception that the security manager needs to be deactivated).

Now its time to focus on the next release with the codename “Etch”. I’m preparing Debian packages of Eclipse 3.1 which use GCC 4.0 to build it. This version of Eclipse will contain natively compile jars too. It will be possible to run Eclipse natively with GCJ or in the ordinary way with kaffe, sablevm, etc. Together with native Eclipse in Fedora Core the Classpath community was a good base to develop/maintain their code and complete Java applications. With the Java-Gnome plugin its possible to write full-blown GNOME applications. Even non-Java people seem to be interested in using Eclipse, e.g. for C++ development with the CDT plugin.

All in all its a good way into the future.