Eclipse in Squeeze (or the lack of)

Eclipse is no longer in Debian Squeeze. It seem sit was unmaintained, and the release packaged was too old, so it was orphaned and removed from the release. Since then, somebody has adopted it, and has packaged Eclipse 3.4 for Lenny, but it did not yet enter Squeeze, and it is not clear to me when it will.

So, I went to the Eclipse website, and got the upstream version (Eclipse 3.5). You get a tar.gz file, that you only have to unpackage, and run. However, when running it, I noticed that some buttons (all buttons?) don’t work. Fortunately, it is a known issue. A detailed explanation to the problem, and some workarounds, can be found in Debian bug #550183:

• Explanation (and workaround 1). libgtk2.18.2-1 provides a new way of dealing with mouse clicks, which apparently Eclipse is not honoring. Downgrading to libgtk2.0-0 (in Debian stable) fixes the issue.
• Workaround 2. “Using Enter to trigger the button works and seemingly also to click once onto the button to get it into the broken pressed-state and then pressing the mouse outside and moving it into the button to release there. This also
  triggeres the click.” (Andreas Pakulat)
• Workaround 3. export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true before launching eclipse. Fixes completely the problem for me.

So, for now, I’m going with workaround 3…