Eclipse Plugins

[Ware, Ryan R]

Let's get this discussion on its own thread.  The questions I have are:

 

*       Do any of the plugin ports add significant functionality for
FreeBSD?

*       Do we want to be in the business of maintaining ports for each
and every Eclipse plugin?

 

For the first, I'm only personally familiar with the CDT port and must
say that the modifications from the generic CDT source are quite small.
In fact, most of the patches are there simply to change any references
from "Linux" to "FreeBSD" which I would suggest isn't the best way to
include this.  I'd actually think the best way to handle this is to get
the appropriate changes added in upstream, but that might be a bit more
of a philosophical discussion.  Regardless, one problem with porting CDT
to the latest version for 3.3.x is that they no longer keep snapshots
available via FTP.  They are only available via svn.  I imagine that
ports has a way of dealing with that, but I haven't seen an example yet.

 

Second, I wouldn't think the FreeBSD community wouldn't want to be in
the business of keeping ports for each potential Eclipse plugin.  That
said, I don't have the history to know why it happened in the first
place.  If the plugin ports continue to be maintained, I think a hard
look would need to be taken to determine what qualifies a plugin to be
included as a port.  I could understand if the particular plugin just
simply won't work under FreeBSD if installed from the Eclipse updater.
However, in the case of something like CDT, it would seem to be more of
a problem then it is worth.

 

What do others think?

 

Ryan