[1631] in athena10
Re: Punt eclipse from extra-software?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Fri Mar 13 20:29:37 2009
Message-Id: <200903140029.n2E0T7qB013708@dit.mit.edu>
To: debathena@MIT.EDU
cc: broder@MIT.EDU, jdreed@MIT.EDU, agrawalr@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:01:53 EDT."
<49BAF3F1.20305@mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:29:07 -0400
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
> 3. The version of eclipse in intrepid (and jaunty) is very old, and
> it being installed was a bit confusing.
>> I don't use Java or Eclipse, so I have no sense of exactly how crusty
>> 3.2 is. Is it crusty enough that we should remove it from extra-
>> software
>> and just use the locker version until 3.4 makes it into Ubuntu?
>>
>> Or is there a potential use case for having 3.2 installed locally for
>> people who don't want to wait for it to run out of the locker?
>>> Alex and I went back and forth on this - I think we decided to go with
>>> the Ubuntu version and users who wanted a newer one could use the
>>> locker. However, if in fact no one wants the older version, we
>>> should probably just punt it.
My experience is that many Eclipse users want as recent a version as they
can get, and I expect to keep recent versions (updated at the start of each
term) in the eclipse-sdk lockers for the forseeable future. The default now,
3.5 M4, is a milestone (late beta) release which is clearly much newer than
what Intrepid supplies.
The same issue is likely to come up with some other applications, notably
Open Office, for which the locker default is now 3.0.1 vs. 2.4.1 in Intrepid.
In some other cases, applications need add-on modules (like R or
netbeans or Eclipse for that matter) which is much easier to deal with
if they're installed in a locker.
My recollection is the same as Jon's- keep both for the moment. In all
such cases now where an application is both in a locker and in Ubuntu,
the Ubuntu one is the default version on the user's path, and to get
the locker version the user needs to run "add -f". We might want to
reconsider this, and perhaps use attach-and-run scripts earlier in the
user's path in some cases, to make newer locker versions the default
instead.
I'm a little reluctant to dispense with Ubuntu's versions completely, in case
they might be dependencies for something else (specific Java versions come
to mind here, for example).
Alex
