Create binary subpackages of eclipse source package

[Pantelis Koukousoulas]

Which subpackages should we produce? Which files should be in each subpackage? What should depend on what?

We need to discuss and decide and then update the control.in / control files to contain the correct information,
as well as the .install and .dirs files for the subpackages.

[Ilya Barygin (randomaction)]

The split in 3.2 debian package seems logical:

* libswt
** eclipse-rcp (depends on libswt) (see below)
*** eclipse-platform (depends on eclipse-rcp)
**** eclipse-jdk (depends on eclipse-platform)
**** eclipse-pde (depends on eclipse-platform)
***** eclipse (depends on eclipse-jdk and eclipse-pde)

But I have to confess that I don't understand the difference between eclipse-rcp and eclipse-platform (whether one is a subset of the other, and whether eclipse-rcp is a necessary step in this hierarchy).

[Rockwalrus (rockwalrus)]

The RCP (Rich Client Platform) is a small (by Eclipse standards) runtime used by Eclipse and many other programs. It basically consists of the OSGi plugin framework, SWT, and JFaces, which is the high-level SWT wrapper widget library. Eclipse Platform is then a much larger library of common components that provide all of the infrastructure for the IDE. It's fairly rare to see an Eclipse plugin that doesn't depend on something in Eclipse Platform.

One of the difficulties we may run into when packaging other RCP applications is that it's a fairly common practice to include parts of Eclipse Platform in those applications as well, and indeed, the documentation encourages you to do so. So to follow Debian policy we would either have to make those applications depend on Eclipse Platform, which is huge, or break out Eclipse Platform into smaller packages, and then have the RCP app depend on just the smaller part.

The only package on that list that doesn't follow upstream is the overall "eclipse" package. Perhaps it should be renamed "eclipse-ide" and made a virtual package. In general, we might want to have virtual packages for all of the configurations that Ganymede ships in now.

[Rockwalrus (rockwalrus)]

Oh, and somewhere on my hard drive I have a script that generates .install files based on feature.xml files. It's good for a rough cut of the .install file. I haven't had a need to use it since I switched to my use-as-much-of-the-standard-eclipse-build-process methodology, since PDE does a perfectly good job of deciding which files should go in a package, and I have one source per package, which makes things more straightforward.