[ptp-dev] Thinking about rsync-before-make hybrid local/remote projects

[Jeffrey Overbey <subscribe-ptp-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wanted to bring this up for discussion.  I'm particularly hoping to 
hear from Chris, Doug, and the other CDT folks on the list.  :-)

At several NCSA discussions about PTP, we have discussed the desire for 
a "hybrid" local/remote project, where the source code is stored and 
edited in a local project and then rsynced to a remote server and built, 
executed, and debugged remotely.

I'm trying to figure out how much work it would take to support this in 
CDT+Photran.

My brainstorm is below.  What are the issues I've missed?  Can we reuse 
the remote make builder for this scenario?  And does anyone have an idea 
for how to handle launching, or what the issues with debugging would be?


--- SEARCH FEATURES/HANDLING INCLUDES

The only real problem in the editing and search features, AFAIK, is 
handling #includes, since the user probably won't have some libraries 
installed locally.  One solution might be allowing the user to specify 
both local directories and remote directories as include paths.

One option is to copy header files from the include paths on the remote 
machine into the local project (or rsync them on every build).  So, 
e.g., /MyEclipseProject/.remote-includes/mpi.h would be a local copy of 
mpi.h from the remote machine.  Then the we would just add 
"/MyEclipseProject/.remote-includes" to the list of include paths, and 
features like Open Declaration and Search would more or less work 
correctly.  (Maybe?)

If that's too hack-ish for your taste, we could also modify the 
preprocessor to load files directly from the remote machine, perhaps 
caching them locally to improve performance.  The problem there is that 
the indexer would then have references to non-local files, so it would 
have to be modified to distinguish these (e.g., use URIs instead of file 
paths), and various UI actions (e.g., Open Declaration and Search) would 
have to be modified to be able to open the remote file in an editor. 
That seems like an expensive change.

--- BUILD

Then, there's actually doing the rsync and remote make.  I would hope 
that we could basically reuse the existing Remote Make builder for the 
latter part.

For sync'ing the source, the main points would be:

(1) the user should be able to specify what directory on the remote 
machine the source should be uploaded (rsync'd) to

(2) the user will probably want to be able to exclude some files (e.g., 
documentation) from the rsync

--- LAUNCH AND DEBUG

Finally, we would need a way to launch the remote executable.  I have no 
idea how to do this, since there's no file in the local project which 
can be launched...

Also, I'm not sure how source lookup works (for debugging), although I 
expect problems here too...


Thanks for any discussion/feedback.

Jeff