Bug#681726: Eclipse is 6 Years Behind in Debian

[Markus Koschany]

Hello,

Am 25.05.2018 um 21:50 schrieb Josh Blagden:
> Hi folks,
> 
>     I just wanted to make the observation that Debian has had the same
> version of Eclipse for the last six years. When can we expect to see a
> new version to the Debian repository?

Maybe when a solar and lunar eclipse happen at the same time.

On a more serious note, we do not intend to ship the current version
with Debian 10 "Buster" again because, as you have rightly observed, it
is obsolete and also broken. I recommend Debian bug #681726 for further
reading. [1]

I still intend to save parts of Eclipse (eclipse-platform) but will also
look into other alternatives to save aspectj and its
reverse-dependencies, whatever is easier to achieve. Though I have made
up my mind and I don't intend to maintain Eclipse and all plugin
packages alone for Buster. I will focus on Netbeans 9 as an alternative
IDE instead which hopefully requires less maintenance but this also
depends on whether it will be released in time before the next freeze.

So in short, we are aware of the situation but we could need more help
from people who really want to _maintain_ Eclipse.

I also thought about something that was discussed at DebConf17 in
Montreal, just packaging the upstream tarball as is. Obviously we can't
ship that in Debian main but we could provide a eclipse-downloader
package in contrib instead. I'm not sure if this is really needed or
desired because it shouldn't be too difficult to run the Eclipse
installer manually. Just a thought, not a promise.

Hope that helps clarifying the situation a little

Regards,

Markus

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/681726

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