[HEADS UP] Eclipse dropping 32-bit arches

[Mat Booth]

The message about Ceph [1] reminded me that we should probably make the
same notification for Eclipse Platform.

The Eclipse Platform upstream is in the process of dropping all support for
32bit arches.

The current state is that upstream are no longer building for 32bit arches
upstream for 4.10 (release 2018-12) onwards. I expect them to start
actively removing 32bit specific code in future releases.

You can read more about the decision on the upstream bug [2]

In Fedora, Eclipse 4.10 which I am building for Rawhide and F29 right now,
still builds for 32bit arches, but this will not last long. I expect in a
future release (4.11 or later) Eclipse will no longer build on x86/arm and
at that time I will no longer be able to support these architectures in
Fedora -- I expect to exclude those arches from Fedora builds.

If you depend on the ECJ batch compiler, this will continue to be available
on all arches as a noarch package. (It is packaged as a discrete SRPM and
has no build or runtime dependency on the Eclipse Platform itself.)

Regards,
Mat

[1]
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]/...
[2] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=526620

[Aleksandar Kurtakov]

On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 5:32 PM Mat Booth  wrote:
> The message about Ceph [1] reminded me that we should probably make the
> same notification for Eclipse Platform.
>
> The Eclipse Platform upstream is in the process of dropping all support
> for 32bit arches.
>
> The current state is that upstream are no longer building for 32bit arches
> upstream for 4.10 (release 2018-12) onwards. I expect them to start
> actively removing 32bit specific code in future releases.

Speaking as upstream representative here - even if we don't have plans to
start removing 32 bit specific code, we are not planning to check that the
whole pointer size magic to support 32 bit is done proper in new code so
native bits of Eclipse will probably fail to compile and it would be up to
Fedora maintainers providing these fixes and keep maintaining them as it
makes  no sense to upstream such changes when support is on its way out.
What is worse though is that sometimes these issues are not catched at
compile time but at runtime resulting in crashing the whole Eclipse -
experience that would give bad name for both Eclipse and Fedora thus
definetely not wanted.
> You can read more about the decision on the upstream bug [2]
>
> In Fedora, Eclipse 4.10 which I am building for Rawhide and F29 right now,
> still builds for 32bit arches, but this will not last long. I expect in a
> future release (4.11 or later) Eclipse will no longer build on x86/arm and
> at that time I will no longer be able to support these architectures in
> Fedora -- I expect to exclude those arches from Fedora builds.

That's the best thing to do IMHO.
> If you depend on the ECJ batch compiler, this will continue to be
> available on all arches as a noarch package. (It is packaged as a discrete
> SRPM and has no build or runtime dependency on the Eclipse Platform itself.
> )
>
> Regards,
> Mat
>
> [1]
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]/...
> [2] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=526620
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[Mat Booth]

On Wed, 5 Dec 2018 at 15:29, Mat Booth  wrote:
> The Eclipse Platform upstream is in the process of dropping all support
> for 32bit arches.
>
> The current state is that upstream are no longer building for 32bit arches
> upstream for 4.10 (release 2018-12) onwards. I expect them to start
> actively removing 32bit specific code in future releases.
>
> You can read more about the decision on the upstream bug [2]
>
> In Fedora, Eclipse 4.10 which I am building for Rawhide and F29 right now,
> still builds for 32bit arches, but this will not last long. I expect in a
> future release (4.11 or later) Eclipse will no longer build on x86/arm and
> at that time I will no longer be able to support these architectures in
> Fedora -- I expect to exclude those arches from Fedora builds.
>
> If you depend on the ECJ batch compiler, this will continue to be
> available on all arches as a noarch package. (It is packaged as a discrete
> SRPM and has no build or runtime dependency on the Eclipse Platform itself.
> )
>
> Regards,
> Mat
>
> [1]
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[e-mail]/...
> [2] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=526620

It's three months later and I wanted to follow up on this.

Eclipse in Fedora has dropped support for 32 bit architectures. The newest
builds of Eclipse 4.11 for F30 and newer reflect this and are built for 64
bit architectures only.

By now I have touched most Eclipse plug-in packages to limit their
availability to the same architectures as Eclipse itself. If you own a
package that is not an Eclipse plug-in but it does have a build or runtime
dependency on Eclipse, then you will need to follow suit and make your
package also exclude 32 bit architecture. If your package simply depends on
Eclipse/Equinox for OSGi APIs, then you might be better switching your
package to build against the OSGi APIs provided by the
osgi-core/osgi-compendium packages instead to stay available on all
architecture. Feel free to ping if you are unsure how to proceed.

Regards,
Mat

PS. My next job is modularising Eclipse in Fedora so that it remains
available in the distro after the great package retiring happens.