A key finding in the recent Eclipse Community Survey was the significant increase of developers using Eclipse in Linux desktops; in participate Ubuntu and Debian. However, the irony of this good news story is that the version of Eclipse on the Debian and Ubuntu distro is Eclipse 3.2, almost 3 years old? Now it looks like from this bug, Eclipse is going to be removed completely from the Debian distro. I can’t really blame them since no one should be using Eclipse 3.2 anyways.
Does anyone care if Eclipse remains on the Debian and Ubuntu distro? At JavaOne I meet some guys from Ubuntu that would be happy to help anyone who is interested in doing the Eclipse packaging work. There is also the Eclipse Linux Tools project that attempts to make it easier to package Eclipsefor Linux distros.
The other option I have heard is that Debian and Ubuntu users are happy to get Eclipse binaries from eclipse.org. This ensures you get the latest and greatest. Thoughts?
If anyone is interested in helping package Eclipse from Debian and Ubuntu, let me know and I will try to connect you to the appropriate people.
