Bug 432934

Summary: Make it easier for users to install and build against older JREs
Product: [Eclipse Project] JDT Reporter: Dani Megert <daniel_megert>
Component: UIAssignee: JDT-UI-Inbox <jdt-ui-inbox>
Status: ASSIGNED --- QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3 CC: curtis.windatt.public, hargrave, markus.kell.r, Michael_Rennie, steve_northover, tjwatson, Vikas.Chandra
Version: 4.4Keywords: helpwanted
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:

Description Dani Megert CLA 2014-04-16 10:46:04 EDT
When time goes by some of the EEs that are required by a project might no longer be easily available for developers (e.g. J2SE-1.4 for Mac).

As a first step we should provide EE description templates for all common EEs and instructions on how to get the corresponding JARs for each EE description. This can be documented in the Wiki or even better in the F1 help for the 'Installed JREs' preference page.

Even better would be to add the *.ee files to PDE API Tools and reuse the EE descriptions that are already there for separate download. For this to work, API Tools would have to give up their private format and use pure class file format for their stubs. This is beyond 4.4.
Comment 1 Thomas Watson CLA 2014-04-17 09:01:24 EDT
For what it is worth, I know there is a tool OSGi uses to generate the jars that represent the osgi.min EEs.  It could be used to generate the EE jars for the various SE EEs.  But I'm not sure what the legal issues are for considering that.