Jeffrey,
To test ProgressBar, the best way is to run little examples. Eclipse uses a custom progress bar, and only a few progress dialogs use the OS one, and they don't put substantial stress on the correctness of the widget. What is interesting is events, and geometry (does it answer believeable computeSize? does it lay itself out correctly?).
I am going to send you some examples I use to test things.
As to running Eclipse within Eclipse: the way you described, is correct. I do not understand what you mean by "you had to reinstall Eclipse". Inner Eclipse can not break the outer Eclipse. In the outer metadata somehow breaks, on restart of the host Eclipse it should be smart enough to repair/rebuild itself. The worst scenario I can imagine is that the workspace gets completely screwed, and then you have to
eclipse $ rm -rf workspace/
eclipse $ ./eclipse
you will lose the workspace but I can absolutely never imagine how a reinstall can be necessary.
If you want to see the current shape of Eclipse on GTK2, you will need to get the graphics package from before last Sunday evening. Be prepared to see a lot of weird bugs. The changes to fonts are breaking, so with the pango fonts it will die saying "can't find font to fall back".
I believe the best thing to do is attack those fonts as soon as we can. This should get us to a point of relatively believable Eclipse behavior (there were really horrible layout problems, but I fixed them today; the Tree and Table are also in pretty bad shape, and those are used *very* heavily in Eclipse - and Eclipse really does put a lot of stress on their exactly correct semantics - but we have an emulated version which we wrote for OSes that have no native trees and tables, and we can go with those for the first day or so). What else really needs much help... toolbar never was good (no arrow items, and only approximately right composite layout), and I am going to fix it as priority #1; Text (in multi-line mode) needs to be rewritten, but it does not break Eclipse because we use our own StyledText (we gc.drawText ourselves).
Please let me know if you need more help - I am really glad to work together with you.
