[linux-distros-dev] Eclipse SDK 3.4 and collaboration

[Andrew Overholt <overholt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Many of you are already working on Eclipse 3.4 for your distros.  I have
been working on it for Fedora as well.  I've got most of the packaging
work done, and have committed it to Fedora CVS [1].  It's not ready yet,
but I wanted to talk about a few things before everyone goes building
packages.

3.4 is not just a simple "build from the source drop and we're done! :)"
p2 (new Update Manager++) changes the way we do things.  We need to
worry about metadata and re-visit how we package non-SDK plugins.

Now that I've almost got the SDK all built and provisioned using the p2
director, I'm going to spend some time investigating how we're going to
package non-SDK plugins (CDT, Mylyn, etc.).  I think for the Ganymede
cycle we may want to just use the dropins mechanism but that may suck
performance-wise.  I'm going to talk to the Equinox team when I've got
more cohesive questions.  Hopefully by the end of the week I'll have
working packages that allow users to install using the p2 UI *and* from
Linux packages.  I'll keep everyone posted.

All of this work made me think about how we need to collaborate more.
Should we (this project) become more of a http://go-ooo.org?  Ben
Konrath kinda started down this route with his eclipse-build project.
Almost all (all?) of our patches -- in Fedora, at least (I hope it's the
same in other distros!) -- are build-related so maybe we can make it so
that all the distros' builds look something like (sorry for the RPM-ish
wording):

prep phase:
tar jxf blah-src.tar.bz2

build phase:
ant

install phase:
ant install

Then the time we all spend on this could be spent once.  What do you
think?  Maybe next year's release (or even 3.4.1's release) could see a
coordinated Linux Distros project release of a "buildable from source
for easy distro consumption" archive that we all use.

There are other things I'd like to talk about:  package name
standardization, file location standardization (as much as possible),
branding, modularity, etc.  We can talk about them throughout this
thread or others if that makes more sense.

Thanks,

Andrew

[1]
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/rpms/eclipse/devel/