Comment 1 for bug 83779

According to "The Eclipse Program Launcher"

http://www.eclipse.org/swt/launcher.html

"In general, the settings of the config file are expected to be overriden by the command line.

    * the -vmargs from the command line replaces in its entirety the -vmargs from the config file."

So this isn't a *bug* as such, but it is certainly behaviour likely to confuse end-users because it isn't clearly documented up-front in the Ubuntu "eclipse" package notices.

Most Eclipse users are going to expect the Eclipse documentation to be the place to look, and not pick-up easily on this over-ride ramification.

According to the Debian "man eclipse" the file "/home/<user>/.eclipse/eclipserc" should be used but there is no indication of *what* to put in it.

From reading "/usr/bin/eclipse" where it includes the file as a shell script it seems the file should contain bash shell statements, for example:

VMARGS="-Xms40m -Xmx512m"

This should be clearly documented in the man-pages, and also up front in the eclipse package installer notes, not least because many developers are needing to increase the heap and Permanent Generation (PermGen) memory settings to cope with the number of class definitions loaded by the Eclipse environment. E.g:

VMARGS="-Xms40m -Xmx512m -XX:PermSize=128M -XX:MaxPermSize=256M"

and may believe that adding these values to eclipse.ini has dealt with the issue.