On Thu, 04 Dec 2003 18:46:00 +0000, thall wrote:

> Ron Kracht wrote:
>> On Wed, 03 Dec 2003 19:57:51 +0000, thall wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Is it safe to update Eclipse using its internal update facility or
>>>should portage always be used?
>>>
>>>T.
>>
>>
>> In my experience. I'd have to say it depends. For updates and plugins that
>> are in portage I use portage. For things that I want that are not yet
>> in portage I either do automatic updates or manual installs.
>>
>> Since I run Eclipse as a non-root user I modified the permissions on the
>> /opt/eclipse/features and /opt/eclipse/plugins directories in order to
>> perform the internal updates. I did this by creating a new group, putting
>> myself in the group, and opening up the group permissions for the
>> directories to allow writing. This worked for updating Eclipse and for
>> some plugins but I had problems with automatic updates of some features (C
>> environment) and some plugins. Since I wanted some of these additions and
>> they were also not yet in portage I downloaded the applicable archives and
>> installed them manually - which worked fine and was trivial to accomplish.
>>
>> One word of caution - after one of these updates Eclipse did not find my
>> workspace (a subdirectory beneath my home directory) and I had to restart
>> Eclipse with (I believe) a -data workspace_directory command line option.
>> Since then it has found the workspace without that command line option.
>>
> Thanks for the reply.
>
> What about for the main Eclipse modules like JDT? Is this likely to
> cause clashes with portage? The reason I ask is that I ran update a few
> weeks ago but I didn't have the appropriate privilages and so it failed
> to complete. When I rebooted, some time later, I found my GDM was
> trashed. I don't know for sure that this was related to the Eclipse
> update but it seemed likely. What do you reckon?

I doubt your GDM problems had anything to do with the Eclipse update
failure. I also use GDM and had the same failure (due to insufficient
privileges) the first time I tried to update Eclipse using the internal
update facility.

I have also used portage to 'redo' an update to Eclipse (originally
done with the internal Eclipse update facility) when portage caught up to
where I was and had no problems.

>
> P.S. What do you think to Eclipse?


I love Eclipse for Java programming. I find that for me it does exactly
what an IDE is supposed to do - it makes me more productive. I will
qualify that though and say that most of my programming is for relatively
large project server development and that even when I do graphical
interfaces I prefer to design them in code. If most of my programming was
relatively small and quick utilities I might just stick with vi :-)