Improvements Eclipse Installation
Hi,
The way we currently install Eclipse plugins in Fedora is incorrect and
somewhat fragile.
RPM places all the plugin artifacts in the proper directories. However
that does not update the eclipse metadata. This means that until the
next time eclipse starts it is unaware of the newly installed plugins.
Because the user would normally run Eclipse not as root Eclipse does not
have permission to write to the meta data files located in the
installation directory. It therefore creates a parallel version in the
user's home directory ~/.eclipse. This creates a fragile installation
and leads to a whole host of problems.
To improve this I have written apatch which runs the Eclipse reconciler
during rpm installation. The Eclipse reconciler is an Eclipse
application which goes through and checks the installation directories
and updates the eclipse metadata with any newly installed plugins.
To add support for this in your eclipse package you have to add the
following line to your rpm spec file:
%_eclipse_pkg [package name]
Here is an example from the eclipse-rse spec file for the
eclipse-rse-sdk rpm:
%package sdk
[...]
%_eclipse_pkg sdk
The above macro expands to the following:
%post sdk
touch /var/run/eclipse/run-reconciler
%postun sdk
touch /var/run/eclipse/run-reconciler
if [ $1 == 0 ]; then
eclipse-reconciler.sh
fi
%posttrans sdk
eclipse-reconciler.sh
I apologize if you have experienced instability in Eclipse installations
on rawhide, it is probably due to these changes. Please let me know if
you have any comments questions or suggestions.
I will be filing a request to update the Eclipse packaging guidelines.
If you are interested in the details of the work, here is a summary in
the form of a patch: http://fpaste.org/pPEC/
Cheers,
Sami