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Building a product containing Eclipse SDK, several projects, and some custom features [message #48705]

Sun, 01 March 2009 09:57

Marc Moser

Messages: 66
Registered: July 2009

Member

Hi,

I'm having trouble building my application. The application consists of
Eclipse itself, a number of Eclipse projects (EMF, GEF, ....) and a
small number of custom developed features. Thus, it is a bit like an
Eclipse IDE with pre-installed packages, some custom functionalities
and customized branding.

Currently, I'm building the application like this: Install Eclipse and
all the projects (EMF, GEF, ...), and use this as my development IDE.
Then, I have a product definition that includes mostly everything from
my development IDE and the custom stuff from the workspace. To build
the product, I simply export it. Now the biggest problem usually is to
create a functional development IDE where all the projects are
correctly installed. Futhermore, it always takes quite a lot of time
and obviously requires manual interaction.

Does anyone see a better way of building such a product? Should I try
to build everything (including Eclipse SDK) directly from sources? Or
will this just create many more problems?

All the best,
Marc

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Re: Building a product containing Eclipse SDK, several projects, and some custom features [message #48739 is a reply to message #48705]

Sun, 01 March 2009 16:29

Chris Aniszczyk

Messages: 674
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Marc Moser wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm having trouble building my application. The application consists of
> Eclipse itself, a number of Eclipse projects (EMF, GEF, ....) and a
> small number of custom developed features. Thus, it is a bit like an
> Eclipse IDE with pre-installed packages, some custom functionalities and
> customized branding.
>
> Currently, I'm building the application like this: Install Eclipse and
> all the projects (EMF, GEF, ...), and use this as my development IDE.
> Then, I have a product definition that includes mostly everything from
> my development IDE and the custom stuff from the workspace. To build the
> product, I simply export it. Now the biggest problem usually is to
> create a functional development IDE where all the projects are correctly
> installed. Futhermore, it always takes quite a lot of time and obviously
> requires manual interaction.
>
> Does anyone see a better way of building such a product? Should I try to
> build everything (including Eclipse SDK) directly from sources? Or will
> this just create many more problems?

Is there a reason you are exporting from the workspace and not have a
headless build in place? Using a product definition is definitely the
way to go because it simplifies the build process. From a headless POV,
you can simply feed the product definition to PDE Build and be good to
go! Here are some articles on how to setup a headless build:

http://www.vogella.de/articles/EclipsePDEBuild/article.html
http://rcpquickstart.com/2007/06/06/getting-started-with-pde -build/

Cheers,

Chris Aniszczyk | EclipseSource Austin | +1 860 839 2465
http://twitter.com/caniszczyk | http://twitter.com/eclipsesource

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Re: Building a product containing Eclipse SDK, several projects, and some custom features [message #48957 is a reply to message #48739]

Tue, 03 March 2009 12:35

Marc Moser

Messages: 66
Registered: July 2009

Member

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your help.

comments below

On 2009-03-01 17:29:26 +0100, Chris Aniszczyk <zx@eclipsesource.com> said:

> Marc Moser wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm having trouble building my application. The application consists of
>> Eclipse itself, a number of Eclipse projects (EMF, GEF, ....) and a
>> small number of custom developed features. Thus, it is a bit like an
>> Eclipse IDE with pre-installed packages, some custom functionalities
>> and customized branding.
>>
>> Currently, I'm building the application like this: Install Eclipse and
>> all the projects (EMF, GEF, ...), and use this as my development IDE.
>> Then, I have a product definition that includes mostly everything from
>> my development IDE and the custom stuff from the workspace. To build
>> the product, I simply export it. Now the biggest problem usually is to
>> create a functional development IDE where all the projects are
>> correctly installed. Futhermore, it always takes quite a lot of time
>> and obviously requires manual interaction.
>>
>> Does anyone see a better way of building such a product? Should I try
>> to build everything (including Eclipse SDK) directly from sources? Or
>> will this just create many more problems?
>
> Is there a reason you are exporting from the workspace and not have a
> headless build in place?

No, not really. I thought that exporting from the workspace is
"simpler" than using a headless build, and therefore I decided to only
consider a headless build once the exporting from the workspace works
well.

> Using a product definition is definitely the way to go because it
> simplifies the build process. From a headless POV, you can simply feed
> the product definition to PDE Build and be good to go!

I have a product definition which is based on features. It includes all
the Eclipse features, quite a few projects (EMF, GEF, GMF, CDO, OCL and
many more) features and a small number of custom features.

Now, for the feature based product definition to be valid, all the
listed features must be either a) in the workspace or b) deployed in
the environment (in the case I'm using a target platform in version
3.5M5, I must base it on an "installation" to see the features and thus
I must have a working environment with the features deployed). Are my
assumptions correct in this case?

Currently what causes the most trouble is creating this environment. I
know that it sounds like something simple, but often I have a lot of
trouble creating it. I start with a "fresh" Eclipse SDK, and then I
install all the additional stuff in the dropins folder. Usually, some
of the projects are loaded, and some aren't, but I usually have quite
some trouble figuring out what exactly didn't load and why. I also
tried using the update sites, but that normally results in even more
problems, as some things (e.g. CDO) cannot be installed without first
putting some stuff in the dropins. That's way I had the (probably bad
:-)...) idea to simply build everything from scratch, Eclipse, projects
and my stuff.

Do you have any suggestions how I could handle this problem better?
Currently, I'm trying to investigate how the modeling amalgamation
projects builds its products, but that seems more complicated than
using a simple product definition.

> Here are some articles on how to setup a headless build:
>
> http://www.vogella.de/articles/EclipsePDEBuild/article.html
> http://rcpquickstart.com/2007/06/06/getting-started-with-pde -build/

Thanks for these pointers.

All the best,
Marc

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