Eclipse is an open-source (under the Eclipse Public License, or EPL) powerful IDE with tooling for various languages. It has a GTK+ user interface and is written in Java. As it is written in Java it is cross-platform and capable of running on Linux, macOS and Windows NT. It is maintained and used by a large community of volunteers and companies.
It is shipped in Fedora (>= 4). Plugins are continuously being added to Fedora. The Fedora packaging team aims to take care of Eclipse plugin review requests quickly. Packaging guidelines for Eclipse plugins can be found here: Packaging/EclipsePlugins.
Fedora Eclipse
Fedora Eclipse is a community project encompassing everything Eclipse-related in Fedora. We ship the Eclipse SDK along with many plugins (see below). We are working on making plugin packaging easier (see RPM Stubby and Fedora Packager for Eclipse).
Would you like to help?
Talk to us on IRC or the java-devel mailing list. Package a plugin for Fedora!
Plugins We Ship
Autotools (part of CDT SRPM)
CMakeed -- Editor for CMake files
CDT -- C/C++ Development Tooling
CollabNet Merge Client for Subclipse -- Take advantage of the new merge cleverness in Subversion 1.5+
Dynamic Language Toolkit -- Complete with TCL and Ruby IDEs
DTP -- Database Development Tools
EclEmma -- Code coverage tool to help you enhance your unit tests.
EGit -- Support for working with Git repositories
EMF -- Eclipse Modeling Framework
EPIC -- Perl tooling
GEF -- Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework (not the Visual Editor )
M2E -- Maven integration for Eclipse
MoreUnit -- Helper for writing more and better unit tests.
Mylyn -- a task-focused UI for Eclipse with bugzilla and trac integration. See also Eclipse Mylyn Red Hat Bugzilla setup instructions and Eclipse Mylyn packaging guide for more Mylyn related information.
Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) -- Parallel and Fortran programming support for Eclipse
PHPEclipse -- PHP Development Tooling
PyDev -- Python IDE for Eclipse
QuickREx -- Regular expression tester
RPM Specfile Generator -- This plugin makes packaging other plugins really easy.
Eclipse SETools -- SELinux policy analysis tools
Shelled -- Editor for shell scripts
SLIDE -- SLIDE is an integrated development environment (IDE) for Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) developers and integrators
Subclipse -- Support for working with Subversion repositories
SWTBot -- UI and functional testing tool for SWT and Eclipse based applications
Webtools -- Eclipse WTP project (mostly packaged)
Plugins Which Need Packaging Work
Contact
Most of the Fedora "free java" people hang out on #fedora-java on Freenode . There are also people on #classpath also on Freenode. Community around the Eclipse Linux Tools project is emerging now and developers are hanging out on #eclipse-linux on Freenode.
Testing
Eclipse ships it's tests as a subpackage called eclipse-tests. Install it via yum install eclipse-tests and launch /usr/bin/eclipse-runEclipsePackageTests.
All test results will be saved and available for later analysis. Note: Not all tests finish successfully for now.
Troubleshooting Eclipse in Fedora
The way Eclipse and its plugins are installed in Fedora differs from the way this is done upstream. This can sometimes lead to installation problems in Fedora. We are working on a solution to make installations more robust in future Fedora releases. In the meantime however, this section is meant to help you troubleshoot those problems. The main theme is "I updated eclipse and my plugins no longer show up".
1. The first thing you want to do is to make sure that you have a bundles.info file in your ~/.eclipse directory
find ~/.eclipse -name bundles.info
If you find one then you can move on to step 2. If you don't find a file that means that there is a problem occurring early on during the startup of Eclipse. To start with you need to make sure that you have a standard Eclipse installation. To do so run the following:
rpm -qV eclipse-platform
Make sure that there is no output when you run the above command. Next, run:
rpm -qf /usr/lib*/eclipse/p2/org.eclipse.equinox.p2.engine/profileRegistry/PlatformProfile.profile/*.profile.gz
Make sure that there are no files which are not owned by any RPMs.
If the result of the above commands is not clean that means that you don't have a clean Eclipse installation. It is possible that you may have run eclipse as root at some point. You can clean that up by removing all files which are not owned by any RPMs, and removing and reinstalling the eclipse RPMs.
If both of the above outputs are clean, you will need to file a bug. Collect the following information and file a bug here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Fedora&component=eclipse
Create a file ~/.options and add the following flags to it:
org.eclipse.equinox.p2.core/debug=true org.eclipse.equinox.p2.core/reconciler=true org.eclipse.equinox.p2.garbagecollector/debug=true
Then run eclipse from a terminal with the following flags:
eclipse -consolelog -debug -clean >& log
Attached this log to the bug you file.
2. If you have found a bundles.info you will need to do is do a diff between your system bundles.info and user bundles.info:
diff `find /usr/lib*/eclipse -name bundles.info` `find ~/.eclipse -name bundles.info`
If there are any bundles present in the system bundles.info and not in the user bundles.info, these bundles are the source of the problem. If the bundles are installed and have the correct versions (the path to the bundles in stated relative to /usr/lib/eclipse or /usr/lib64/eclipse) then that means that things have been upgraded in a way that contradicts the previous installation. Adding those bundles to your user bundles.info will solve the problem. Before doing so backup your ~/.eclipse directory just in case. Here is a script wich will do that:
diff `find /usr/lib*/eclipse/ -name bundles.info` `find ~/.eclipse/ -name bundles.info` | grep "<" | sed s/"< "/""/ >> `find ~/.eclipse/ -name bundles.info`
If the extra bundles are not present or have different versions than what is in the system bundles.info, that means that the bundles.info is faulty and needs to be updated. Please file a bug which includes the diff.
Plans
We ship the Eclipse SDK (eclipse SRPM) version 4.3.0 in Fedora 19. Other Kepler release train projects are also updated to their Helios versions.
The other plugins we ship should work with Eclipse 4.3 without problems. We will of course have to coordinate testing them all.
References
- Introduction to Eclipse on Fedora
- Confessions of an Eclipse convert
- Eclipse for developing Mono applications