I recently started working on a PHP project using Eclipse as the IDE. I typically use OpenSUSE on my linux machiens but I was given a development machine with Gentoo on it and started setting up the window manager to work on the project. Emerging eclipse worked fine and installed eclipse. However, once I started trying to add PDT and Subclipse plugins I started running into problems.
Eclipse fired up just fine but then the find and install plugins menu option was broken – it simply would not open. A simple fix got around this, but then it failed to resolve plugin dependencies automatically. With no search feature, finding these necessary packages became quite the chore. Once I finally got all the dependencies resolved and my plugins installed, I ran into an even bigger problem. None of the plugin perspectives or views were available! Also, none of the plugin preferences showed up in the preferences menu.
After several remove/install cycles I just pulled down the tar/gzip copy and installed it into my home directory instead of using the version packaged into Gentoo. Once I did this everything went well and I was able to pull in the necessary plugins, resolve the dependencies automatically, and have them immediately available on a restart of eclipse. I don’t know what the Gentoo folks did to mess up Eclipse so badly but they really need to take a look at how they set it up and correct the mistakes.