When reading Planet Eclipse I noticed potential for misunderstanding of what removing the WPF build means.
For those interested in having Eclipse look modern on Windows (bug 293226), the win32 APIs provide us with everything we need to do that for the Eclipse IDE, and many modern looking Windows 7 apps are written using win32. For some RCP apps WPF could be useful, eg, if your app needs media services. But as far as I know we don’t have a near-term need for the Eclipse IDE to make use of those facilities and are better off focusing on win32-based improvements. The presence of the WPF build has been confusing since it encouraged early adopters to mistake it for the cutting edge of Eclipse, so it’s good to see it go.
Mik
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Dr. Mik Kersten
Tasktop CEO, Mylyn Lead
http://twitter.com/mik_kersten
From: eclipse-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:eclipse-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John Arthorne
Sent: January-27-10 11:57 AM
To: eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx; eclipse.org-committers@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [eclipse-dev] WPF Builds
Since the Eclipse Platform 3.3 release we have been providing an "early access" port of Eclipse Platform and SWT running on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). There has been very little interest in this port, and nobody interested in making the investment needed to turn this initial port into an officially supported reference platform for Eclipse. One factor here is that we have been able to exploit capabilities of new Windows versions using the old win32 API that we previously thought would require a port to WPF. With the win32 port of Eclipse serving us well, there has been no need to do the work required to complete, polish, and maintain the WPF port as well.
For this reason, and because every port we build incurs a cost in build speed, foundation and mirror server space, etc, we are planning to stop producing a WPF build in the Eclipse Helios (3.6) stream. If you have a strong interest in this port, and in particular if you are interested in making the investment needed to maintain this port, please chime in on the following bug report. If there is sufficient interest in developing and using this port, we can certainly continue building it.
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=293830
John
