[Mono-list] MONO and tooling...

[Michel Dagenais]

> I'm Marc Erickson, the communications manager for the open-source Eclipse 
> tools integration projects. 
...
> Eclipse itself is written in the Java language, with a high efficiency UI 
> construction layer called SWT that adopts the look and feel of the 
> platform it runs on. All of this is in open source under the Common Public 
> License. It runs on Linux on a variety of VMs. One of these VMs, called 
> JIKES, is in open source. See: 
> http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/jikes/ and 
> http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/jikesrvm/?origin=jikes for more 
> details. 

I was under the impression that there were still some dependencies on
Sun's JDK/JRE. I just looked again on the www.eclipse.org site and the
Java Runtime Env. suggested as prerequisite to eclipse are Sun's, and
IBM's based on Sun's. Am I mistaken? Is there a way to run eclipse
relying solely on free software (as in speech)? Or in other words could
I eventually install eclipse from debian/main?

Havoc Pennington recently had an article on gnomedesktop.org with the
same conclusion, very nice but...:

hp writes "The Eclipse IDE hasn't gotten much attention in the GNOME  
world but is a promising IDE with a GTK 2 interface. It's been making
progress recently; they now have a decent C/C++ editor (the CDT) and the
GTK 2 port works fairly well. See below for some screenshots and info on
how to try out the Eclipse CDT.
..
You also need the IBM Java packages, which are linked from eclipse.org.
As Eclipse uses GTK 2 rather than AWT or Swing, it is reasonably close
to working with gcj and classpath, which would make Eclipse 100% free
software; but currently it requires the proprietary JDK.