Re: Revisiting the Gnome Bindings (Great development environment - Eclipse?)

[Mark Wielaard <mark klomp org>]

Hi,

On Wed, 2004-09-22 at 11:00, Murray Cumming wrote:
> I personally think that "Great development environment" is a more
> compelling reason, given that the majority of software development is
> in-house stuff that will never be on distros. That really is a vast huge
> immense amount of unseen software.

I noticed that corporate "hackers" like "visual integrated development
environments". Havoc Pennington has been advocating to look into Eclipse
(http://www.eclipse.org). He wrote an article on Footnotes about it: 
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=724

The GCC developers made sure that Eclipse compiles (to native code) with
gcj (even though it is written in the java programming language):
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2003-08/msg00055.html
Raw old rmp packages at http://sources.redhat.com/eclipse/

And it can even be used to integrate with java-gnome and glade:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/java/2003-11/msg00087.html
http://www.klomp.org/mark/classpath/eclipse-gnome-gij.png

For those that don't know about using emacs for real development work
and those that like shiny user interfaces eclipse is actually a nice
environment to develop with.

There are two problems with this though from a free software/gnome
perspective:

- Packaging is a real pain with the free tools at the moment.
  The Debian packager is looking for help because he doesn't have enough
  time. And the Fedora packager seems to have been reassigned to another
  project (Eclipse was scheduled to appear in FC2, but didn't).
  Eclipse is big, has lots of dependencies, and is only experimentally
  supported on the free runtimes gcj/kaffe/etc. So packaging should
  probably be done by a dedicated team. There is currently no such
  dedicated team.

- Licensing. Even though Eclipse is free software, all of eclipse is
  distributed under either the CPL (Common Public License) or the Apache
  License 1.1/2.0. These are incompatible with the GPL so integration of
  larger works based on the eclipse framework will not be possible. The
  Eclipse board has been contacted about this problem and seem to be
  interested in solving this. But nobody seems to be actively trying to
  resolve this conflict. Maybe this is where the Gnome Foundation Board
  could help. How was this issue solved with the Mozilla code base?

Cheers,

Mark