[gentoo-dev] Updating community maintained Gentoo Eclipse IDE repository ebuild to EAPI 7

[Kevin Brace <kevinbrace@gmx.com>]

Hi,

I am a first time poster who just subscribed to the gentoo-dev mailing list.
I installed Eclipse IDE 4.6 to one Gentoo Linux installation using the community maintained Eclipse IDE repository ebuild when Portage still supported EAPI 6, but the current release of Portage no longer does so.
I have been increasingly annoyed by this community maintained Gentoo Eclipse IDE ebuild giving me weird warning type messages when running Portage.
Of course, it does not stop Portage from running, but I do not like it aesthetically.
The cause of the warning messages are that ebuilds are still at EAPI 5 (for Eclipse IDE 4.5) and 6 (for Eclipse IDE 4.6), and they need to be updated to at least EAPI 7.
I got so annoyed by this that I decided to take them into my own hands, and I managed to update ebuilds in question.
I got rid of all the annoying messages displayed when running Portage, and it appears that Eclipse IDE installs fine.
So I directly contacted one developer of the three still active on GitHub, but he refused to take up the ebuilds and update them.
He does not seem to want to maintain the repository any longer (he appears to be disillusioned with the Eclipse IDE ebuilds they developed for some reason), and even suggested that a new community repository to be created to replace the now obsolete Eclipse IDE repository.
This one I am talking about.

https://github.com/gentoo/eclipse-overlay

Personally, I really did not want to get involved in this type of OS infrastructure project because I work on totally different type of code development projects, but I feel like something has to be done to update the Eclipse IDE ebuilds to keep up with Portage.
Let me know what more experienced Gentoo developers think.

Regards,

Kevin Brace
Brace Computer Laboratory blog
https://bracecomputerlab.com