My home and work environments are a mess with GNOME 2.5 unstable. I need to use Eclipse for my work life, but it bombs when it tries to use the GTK 2.3 ToolBar. At home I used jhbuild to build G 2.4. The firewalls are closed at work, so I used gargnome to build G 2.4. So I've got a full G 2.4 installation on both machines to run one app. That's bogus. I like Eclipse's editing, versioning, compiling, debugging, and unit testing features for Java, but found its C features are inadequate.

I decided to make an effort to use Eclipse's CDT to develop GNOME software to justify a G 2.4 installation. For starters, CDT doesn't play with autotools; that is the single greatest flaw the IDE has. The CDT project is looking to add better Makefile handling in the future, but are not willing to commit to autotools. I'm surprised Redhat is promoting a tool that cannot manage the make tools used my most of the OSS software the Redhat uses. I added a couple sh scripts and hooked them up as external tools to configure the Makefiles. CDT Make itself is pretty dumb, so I needed a small sh script to compile the file I'm editing. Code assist (code completion) is limited to the symbols in the current project. I created a script that mines the common GNOME headers and updates Eclipse's code template feature to provide some code completion for types and functions that I commonly use hacking Medusa. The large number of templates really slow the editor down so ill need to refine that.

I've been hacking on Medusa for a week and without any problems. I really like using Eclipse's outline, version control, and debugging features. I guess the next thing I need to do is hook up gnome-doc to make API docs.