Why does Ubuntu 14.04 stick with (old) Eclipse 3.8 when 4.3 is out?
Ubuntu is usually a cutting edge distro. But why does it stick to a 2011 version of Eclipse when we are 4 years into 4.x development?
It's not even optional and cannot be installed from the repositories. And it's not 'easy' from a download either. For some reason, the Java SE 7 reference implementation, OpenJDK, is not enough, and you need the Oracle version. Why? This isn't available from the repo's either, and you need some weird untrusted 3rd party repo for that or follow a whole chapter on how to install it yourself.
There were problems three years ago. When Juno 4.2 came out, it had a lot of performance issues. Eclipse Director Mike Milinkovich explains one of the reasons is lack of funding. For the first time in a major release:
"The performance test were turned off because the Eclipse platform team has a serious resource issue."
For that reason, developers released unnamed and unpromoted version 3.8 simultaneously with 4.2 to bridge the gap for this (hopefully) temporary problem, and it's popularity caused a notable trend downwards amongst developers. As one Eclipse b3 developer mentioned:
"I was stunned by the performance improvement after the switch. The 3.8 platform is much MUCH faster"
The 3.8 release is still a popular alternative to the 4.x branch among developers (ask my colleagues or google), I think mainly because of (genuine) trust issues. But the bridge (read: support for 3.8) has closed now that 4.3 is released.
The core problems (funding and developers) have not been fixed though, as seen by Google's gesture of donating money to the Eclipse Foundation in the hopes that other companies will follow suit. Does this mean that 4.3 is still not up to par with the 3.x standards?
This is not a problem with a plugin or a feature for a specific language, this is a problem within the core of the platform itself. (But I'm using WST with Javascript and V8 plugins for PHP and Node development in particular.)
This is not a specific platform problem either. There are similar complaints from Linux, Windows, and OSX users. (But I'm using Linux (Mint 13).)
On the one hand you have people telling the EOL for 3.8 "proves" that 4.3 is fine now. On the other hand (see comments):
"I've moved back to 3.8 due to constant crashes on ubuntu with 4.3"
3.8 is far from problem-free and I wouldn't mind to get a smoother development experience. So I am wondering, why is Eclipse 4 'kept from us' by the people who decide what software versions are 'good for us' (AKA what goes into the official repository)?
- lucid (10.04 LTS)
- Eclipse 3.5.2-2
- precise (12.04 LTS)
- Eclipse 3.7.2-1
- raring (13.04)
- Eclipse 3.8.1-1
- saucy (13.10)
- Eclipse 3.8.1-4
- trusty (14.04 LTS)
- Eclipse 3.8.1-5.1
- utopic (14.10)
- Eclipse 3.8.1-5.1
Update 2014-05-30: I just tried Kepler (again) and it still suffers from UI glitches out of the box. E.g.:
And no, changing the inactive window toolbar background color in preferences does not fix this. (Even if it would, this would be a silly default choice).
I would like to know, from someone who is not positively or negatively biased because of their own highly specialized and tweaked workflow - preferably from someone with experience in the Ubuntu package maintaining process for non-trivial packages - why this decision is made by a team of professionals who know what they are doing for the most widely used Linux distribution out there?
Answer
Eclipse Juno was released 2012-06-27. On 2012-07-17 a bug concerning the responsiveness of the UI was reported. Four months later, around 2012-11-14 the first patch was released to the official update-site.
Many users, however, completely missed the release of the patches. I assume the information drowned in the FUD, and other more important news, that was spread around that time. At the end of 2012 I posted an answer on SO. Apparently I was not the only one for whom the patch fixed this performance issue. On 2013-02-22 Eclipse 4.2.2 was released, which contained the same patch, yet I kept receiving upvotes for my answer on SO until June.
Probably the only known fact among developers is that Eclipse had serious performance issues at some point. However, the knowledge about scope, magnitude and duration of these issues seems to me like a series of common misconceptions. There was a four months period during which it was a good idea for many Eclipse users to stick with the 3.8 branch. I say "many" because I worked with 4.2.0 and 4.2.1 and it was O.K. for me. Subjectively, switching tabs was about two times slower and the IDE froze maybe once a day for a couple of seconds. For colleagues of mine the problem was much more severe. I assume it depended on your setup and on your workflow, however, I never felt like investigating further because I knew the platform developers were working on the issues, and there was a good fallback, using 3.8.
One year and three Eclpse releases later these serious performance issues are still fixed. Of course, this doesn't mean that there are no more performance issues. As of now I find 1979 reports in the Eclipse bugzilla with the keyword "performance". This doesn't mean that Eclipse is very buggy, but only that it is very well documented and open. Whether or not you are affected by any of these issues, again, depends on the setup, the plug-ins you are using and your workflow. I am a Java, plug-in and EMF developer. I work with medium to big work spaces (~1M LoC), and Eclipse 4.3.1 is fast enough. The 3.8 release is not an option for me because as Eric said, it won't receive all of the important updates. People will still continue using it in the future. Many of them will also continue using Internet Explorer 5.5. If you try the 4.x branch and notice any performance issues, please report them, but be specific about your setup.
From the official Wiki page:
Several major performance defects have been addressed in Juno SR2 (4.2.2). Community members have confirmed that these fixes substantially address the performance problems with editor and view opening, closing, and switching. These fixes are widely available in Juno Service Release 2 (February 2013). All defects are also resolved in the Kepler (June 2013) release stream.