Comment 29 for bug 549904

On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 3:05 PM, Niels Thykier <email address hidden> wrote:

> Hi
>
> @arkmundi: We cannot help you debug this when you use eclipse from eclipse.org, but I can tell you that Ubuntu has a vastly different setup than eclipse.org in this case. Particularly we do not embed the entire eclipse java compiler into libjasper-java[1] and we have patches in eclipse to make it load the correct bundles when the help is requested.

These changes should be documented in a README.Debian (maybe they are
-- ATM I'm not close to an Ubuntu box so I haven't checked)

>  A word of advice however, eclipse from eclipse.org is (as I recall) installed as a "single-user" install, which means it expects full read-write access to its "install location". You should generally not put this in /usr/lib or /usr/share, but instead unpack it in (e.g.) your home dir and run it from there.
>
> To all others; I will strongly recommend *NOT* to start eclipse as root
> as it makes it possible for eclipse to modify some metadata about which
> plugins are installed via Ubuntu. It can make it very difficult for us
> to debug issues if eclipse has changed this metadata.

The widespread advice "run some config tool" as root is becoming a problem
not just for eclipse, but many other apps -- often user ends up with files in
their home directory owned by root. It may be time to start adding checks to
the tools or using wrappers to discourage this practice.

--
George N. White III <email address hidden>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia