[cdt-dev] questions about building and modifying CDT plugins

[Tim Black <timblaktu@xxxxxxxxx>]

I acquired a patch to org.eclipse.cdt.make.core to work around a known CDT issue (Bug 133881), but before I could apply it, I noticed that there are several build errors on a fresh CDT checkout from dev.eclipse.org. I apologize for the newbie question. This is my first attempt at building any CDT plugins. I have searched the cdt-dev
archives and found lots of useful information, but no lightbulbs have popped up yet. I
have found complaints of similar problems that turned out to be a
problem with the timing of CVS mirror snapshots are taken (in between
someones commits), but I am pretty sure this is not the issue since
I've been seeing the same errors for 3
days now. Here's what I have done:

I did a fresh install of the current release (3.5.2r35) of the RCP/Plug-in Developers distribution of Eclipse, and then followed the instructions at http://wiki.eclipse.org/Getting_started_with_CDT_development. I checked out the listed plugins from HEAD->org.eclipse.cdt->all. Upon building all projects, several build errors and warnings accumulated. Many of the errors were "x cannot be resolved to a type" or "import y cannot be resolved".

Since I couldn't find the definition of these 'x's anywhere in the projects I had just checked out, I ASSumed that the plugin list on that "getting started" page hadn't been updated in a while and there were feature and/or plugin dependencies not listed. So next I deleted all the recently checked out projects from my workspace, and went back to HEAD->org.eclipse.cdt->all and checked out *all* of its contents. This time the build found 100 errors, again many of which were the "x cannot be resolved to a type" type, but many more. 

I found one thread in which someone was having similar problems to me in January. The OP problem was solved by this post: http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/cdt-dev/msg16997.html in which someone listed the set of features and plugins required to build the org.eclipse.cdt feature. When I compare the list to my checkout, I see that there are some missing from my workspace (the ones with dsf in the name) bc they weren't in org.eclipse.cdt->all. I located and checked those out, but cleaning and rebuilding all projects in my workspace resulted in the same (and then some) errors.


I can post the build output if that would help, but at this point, I figured someone would see something blatantly wrong in my procedure. I would appreciate any help or guidance in the right direction. My platform is as follows:

tblack@debian:~$ uname -a
Linux debian 2.6.26-2-686 #1 SMP Wed Feb 10 08:59:21 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux
tblack@debian:~$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_12"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_12-b04)

Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 11.2-b01, mixed mode, sharing)

Thanks,
Tim