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Re: SWT choice on Eclipse



* David Goodenough <david.goodenough@btconnect.com> wrote:
> I recently decided that I needed to move from a hand installed eclipse to a 
> debian installed one.  So duly installed it only to discover that I do not
> seem to have the the choice of using the GTK binding.  

In the moment it uses gtk bindings by default and its the only one,
which is compiled.

> I do not run Gnome, and have been running the Motif binding (I would love
> a KDE binding but license condition still seem to forbid) without problems
> for a long time.

Its not a gnome binding but only gtk libs. I will add some stuff in
the readme on the next release with some tips how to get eclipse a
bit faster (using *no* anti alising is a big leap forward :)).

> Any chance of having a Motif build as well?  This should probably
> make libswt a virtual package, and have two separate packages 
> for libswt-gtk and libswt-motif.

Yes, I thought about this too. There will be some problems, as 
the launcher also uses the same graphic lib, which the swt plugin
uses (for displaying an error message...). So either this is 
split into a different package with the same virtual packaging 
system or I will go ahead and just replace the launcher with 
a script (its anyway mostly done).

BTW, there is also a port to FOX, which sounds quite a bit faster
than gtk, but is still very alpha software :/ Someone else is trying
to port swt on top of swing...

> I certainly had no difficulty in building the Motif version, but that was
> a little while ago (2.0 days).

The problem is not the building (that's mostly one ant and one make
call), but the way how to handle this two different plugins: They
can be installed together and you would have to change the -ws
param, which is passed to the main class. Also the launcher is a
problem as this program gets a default value at build time, so it 
might happen, that it will start the gtk ws (BTW: Windows system; 
SWT Speech for the underlying toolkit), when only the motiv one 
is installed. I'm not sure, how that could be handled in a 
automatically manner (something in the post install scripts and
dpkg-reconfigure together with a rc file in /etc?).

I'm not sure about licens issues with open motive bindings.

So the problems are:
* How to handle the two different plugins in a autmatically manner
* should both packages be made from the same source (would mean
  doubleing the build dependencies and introducing open motif
  dependencies). The alternative would be to use the new SWT drops.
* Proposing a new virtual package for libswt-java with will be
  provided by libswt-gtk-java and libswt-motif-java (and possible
  future ports). I just read that you need to ask debian-devel to
  'get' one. Not sure how difficult that is. 

Any comments?

Jan



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