Ah, sarcasm in bloom…

I think I ruffled some feathers with my last comment on Eclipse Bug Report #57897. I hate when you write something and it makes someone else think you are saying something that you are not saying. That’s just the sort of thing that happened in my recent communication with Cristophe Cornu of IBM’s Eclipse Team; his response to my comment chronicling the pains it took to build Eclipse on PowerPC Linux with GTK follows:

Barry:
As you reported, you need these packages in order to compile swt/gtk and the
launcher on a machine with GTK2 libraries. These prerequisites must be set up
before running the Eclipse build script. They require root access and a build
script cannot be expected to install new packages.

Here’s my response contained in comment #48:

(Begin excerpt)
In response to the question in comment #47, my Debian distribution is sid, which is the most up-to-date of the three options for Debian: woody (stable), sarge (testing) and sid (unstable).

In no way do I think that anyone including myself would expect a build script to install packages from various Linux distribution package management systems; that would be a highly impractical notion. However, in the installation instructions for the srcIncluded packages, linux gtk ppc is a supported build and there is no mention of prerequisite libraries. The only hint at this is in the Known Limitations section of the instructions file included at the root of the package:

file:///instructions.html#limitations

2. Only Java source code is compiled. *.dll, *so, *sl and Eclipse executables are all provided prebuilt in this build process. The linux, gtk, ppc configuration will require a re-compilation of the eclipse executable and swt libaries and copying these files to the apppropriate directories.

The only thing that note really mentions is the need to do separate compiling of the launcher and libraries; there is no mention of how many external dependencies there. The average Eclipse user tends to be unfamiliar with GTK development libraries, since the two are quite unrelated. While working through the process this weekend, I found this one quite vague FAQ entry in a document held in the Eclipse platform-swt-home cvs module:

file:///platform-swt-home/faq.html#gtkstartup

Q: What do I need to run SWT on linux gtk?
A: SWT requires the following gtk libraries with the specified versions or later:

For Eclipse 3.0:

* Gtk 2.2.1-4
* Atk 1.2.0-2
* Glib 2.2.1-1
* Pango 1.2.1-3
* Freetype 2.1.3-6

For Eclipse 2.1:

* Gtk 2.0.6-1
* Atk 1.0.1-1
* Glib 2.0.4-1
* Pango 1.0.3-2
* Freetype 2.1.2

That sort of information would be quite helpful in the instructions.html file of the scrIncluded packages, and might have saved me hours of trial and error. Also, if I hadn’t been perusing the headers of the .mak files, I would never have known about the dependency on pkgconfig.

Knowing this sort of thing also helps those of us who are involved in package management for Eclipse on our distros, to facilitate the use of Eclipse on open source platforms. Thanks for your attention to this item.
(End of excerpt)

Can’t we all just get along? 8^)