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On 8/27/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb / cesmail.net> wrote:
>
> Just as a side note, I don't currently have Eclipse installed on my
> Gentoo Linux "development workstation". So, I did an "emerge -pv
> eclipse-sdk" to see what's involved, and edited the output file with Vim
> :) ...
>

It's not really a fair comparison. If you built an Emacs with all the
capabilities of an Eclipse, it would make use of a large number of
platform-specific libraries that are already present for many other
purposes. Almost all the libraries listed in your emerge output are Java
libraries unrelated to Eclipse that provide similar features to those native
libraries. The down side of using Java in this case is that many wheels had
to be reinvented...note jzlib, for example. The up side is that those
libraries almost always "just work" without modification or even
recompilation on other platforms. The other half of this is some Gentoo
stupidness...since Gentoo builds everything from scratch, it pulls in a vast
number of projects to build Eclipse that are in many cases not even
necessary for running Eclipse, since the tools to build Eclipse are also
written in Java and have many of their own dependencies...etc etc. I
*rarely* use Gentoo to completely rebuild Java apps, since it's usually
totally unnecessary; prebuilt binaries will be exactly as fast and run
without modification.

It might be more fair to compare a prebuilt Eclipse, since Emacs benefits
from most of the libraries and tools it needs already existing on most *NIX
environments. On my system, where Java is prevalent, installing Eclipse
involves only a couple packages. Or perhaps compare Eclipse to building
Emacs and all its native library dependencies, including for example libc.

-- 
Contribute to RubySpec! @ www.headius.com/rubyspec
Charles Oliver Nutter @ headius.blogspot.com
Ruby User @ ruby.mn
JRuby Developer @ www.jruby.org

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