Screencast: Creating an Eclipse download package "from scratch"

UPDATE: As of Service Release 1 (SR1) of Eclipse Galileo (aka, 3.5.1) the process described in this screencast is no longer necessary for 64-bit Mac OS X builds. 64-bit Cocoa builds of all the download packages are now available directly from the Eclipse downloads page.


If the cave you've been living in does not have Internet service, then perhaps it will come as news to you that Galileo was successfully released last week. It's a truly impressive feat to release so reliably so many projects year after year - you'd think that corporate internal and consumer software projects would take note and figure out what it is that enables the yearly release train to succeed when so many projects deliver late, over budget, or not at all. But, I digress...

Being a recent immigrant to the Nation of Mac, I was among the glad to see the Cocoa port graduate from incubation. However, all is not 100% happy in Eclipse+Mac land. The Eclipse Packaging Project (EPP), the small group that produces those easily consumable downloads, the themed packages of plug-ins built on top of the core platform, has limited resources. And with limited people, they can not produce the packages for every hardware/OS platform on which Eclipse is known to run. Of particular interest to me is the conspicuous absence of EPP package builds for 64-bit OS X. After some discussion, it appears we the community can't make a 64-bit build happen until the first "service release" of Galileo, sometime in the Fall. I'm disappointed, but I (mostly) understand the position that EPP is in.

So, what do we do if we want to make full use of all the 64-bit goodness of our operating system and Java 6 JVM? Well, it turns out that re-constructing the EPP packages from the "base platform" SDK is not all that difficult. Ekke Gentz has already blogged some text+picture instructions; my screencast below brings the process to life.

Note: the URL of the EPP update site used in the screencast is

http://download.eclipse.org/technology/epp/packages/galileo/

UPDATE: The package downloads page has been updated so that the Mac 64-bit SDK download is available directly, rather than having to go through the "Other Downloads" page. This makes the process a bit simpler than what is demonstrated in the screencast. If you're following this process for 64-bit Cocoa on OS X, you can get the Platform SDK directly in the Eclipse Classic section, as shown here (click to enlarge):