Re: [platform-releng-dev] buildable source zips for eclipse.org plugins

[Kim Moir <Kim_Moir@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Pascal, Sonia and I have reviewed your
proposal and have the following questions and comments from the perspective
of the Eclipse platform build process.

Eclipse is not built by checking out
a src tree and running a makefile, the approach that  many other open
source projects take.  We use pde build to manage the complexity of
determing dependancies and generating the appropriate ant scripts that
are used to build Eclipse.  This avoids the problem of having to modify
a makefile each time a dependancy changes.  Having a static build.xml
in the repository to build eclipse does not scale for prerequisite changes.

proposal>Eclipse does not currently have a standard
method of releasing buildable source archives; the SDK can be built and
packaged with the "srcIncluded" zip but the plugins cannot easily
be built. Part of the reason for this seems to be that users are intended
to use the update site feature of Eclipse to install plugins. The update
site functionality, however, does not offer the afore mentioned benefits.


With respect to building other plugins,
there are dependancies that need to be managed.  You can't simply
checkout the source for a plugin and compile it without first determining
the other plugins that it depends on.

proposal> Eclipse 3.0 introduced a new build method
for plugins; the source is fetched as part of the build process by a special
releng plugin that is responsible for the actual building. To build the
plugin in a way that can be controlled, the sources are pre-fetched into
custom tarball. At build time, cvs access is disabled and the plugin is
built from the pre-fetched tarball in a chrooted environment. 

We are a bit confused by this comment.
 I don't think it describes what we do.  Could you elaborate
further?  

Here is a link that may be useful, it
describes how to build eclipse components using ant and org.eclipse.releng.eclipsebuilder
and org.eclipse.releng.basebuilder.

http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/~checkout~/org.eclipse.releng.eclipsebuilder/readme.html?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/html

proposal> The main problem, however, is that not all
plugin projects tag their cvs tree correctly when a release is made. This
prohibits anybody from building that particular version of the plugin.


Each time we run an integration build,
we check out the versions of plugins and features referred to in org.eclipse.releng/maps
as the source for the build.   The org.eclipse.releng  project
is tagged each integration build with a version that corresponds to the
build id to easily identify the version of the builder that was used. This
can be used to determine the version of the plugins and features that are
used in the build. We also rtag all plugins and features with a release
name shortly following an official release such as 3.0.1.

Build method #2 does not reflect Eclipse
design intent.  The  src.zips are included in the SDK downloads
to assist  during debugging, they are not designed to be used to  build
Eclipse.

The scripts used to create srcIncluded
and srcFetch scripts actually reside on an internal server for historical
reasons for the simple reason that we haven't had time to move them to
the external server.  We'll look into moving them as time permits.
In summary, it's a zip of the source tree, the generated build scripts
that arise from the build process described in the link above.  We'll
provide more details when we move the scripts to the external server.  I've
opened a bug for this issue, please feel free to annonate it with additional
comments  https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=83443

We welcome your input into our build
process and suggestions for improvement.

Kim

Ben Konrath <bkonrath@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: platform-releng-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx

01/19/2005 04:04 PM

Please respond to
platform-releng-dev

To	platform-releng-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
cc
Subject	[platform-releng-dev] buildable source zips for eclipse.org plugins

Hi, 

I would like to get comments on an RFC I wrote about eclipse.org
providing a way to build build plugins from source:

http://people.redhat.com/bkonrath/eclipse/buildable-source-zips.html

I couldn't figure out how the eclipse-SDK "srcIncluded" and "srcFetch"
zips are generated. I checked out the entire /home/eclipse and grepped
for "sourceBuild" and "srcIncluded" but nothing turned
up. Where can I
find this this information? Is the main build.xml in cvs somewhere?

Please let me know if this is the wrong list.

Thanks, Ben

_______________________________________________
platform-releng-dev mailing list
platform-releng-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/platform-releng-dev