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Form day to day more and more people are using the Eclipse RCP for commercial projects. All of them need things like a automatic build, automated testing and so on. In Eclipse it really great to be able to generate the build-scripts for a project. This made live a lot easier. But it would be really nice to go one step further an have an eclipse exporter / wizard which guides the people through the process of creating an automated build and test process. All the information necessary for that are available within the IDE. What from my point of view would be needed is the following: - a wizard which creates the map files. For the time being the have to be written by hand, right? But the IDE knows already at least the location of the projects in the cvs and the location of the cvs itself - an exporter for build.properties as well as the custom targets.xml Most of the information can be derived from the IDE, or at least the IDE can help. - a wizard to choose the testsuites to run after a build, maybe with the possibility to specify the html suite where to publish the results. - it would be useful to have a section where you'll be able to specify a number of update sites (with feature IDs and version numbers). The build should be downloaded if not available before to the build starts. If they aren't the build could download them automatically. What would be really nice to get would be a (maybe down-striped) eclipse that runs a build and testsuite on its own. The build output should be a directory which contains the "normal" build, a update site build, including the site.xml, html-site(s) with the the build logs and (a) html-site(s) with the test results. I think to have something like that also helps people a lot in real-world-projects.
The automation requested around map files is done in the org.eclipse.releng.tools plugin available at the bottom of the eclipse SDK dl page. I'm moving this to PDE UI, because the core of the request is really ui related.
Pascal, thanks for your reply. AFAIK it is not yet possible to automatically create the map files, is it? BTW: You have forgotten to change the component from build to UI.
Hi Bernd! You might want to have a look at http://www.pluginbuilder.org. It addresses many points of your eclipse exporter/wizard proposal. Some of the features (e.g. generation of map files for CVS and Subversion) are tightly coupled with the PDE internals. That is probably one of the major risks of doing those things outside of PDE. However there are other features - like the test automation stuff - which are not so much related to PDE build. I'd like to see pluginbuilder as a place where people share that sort of functionality which is not so meaningful for the build at eclipse.org (and wont therefore make it into the PDE feature) but which many smaller Eclipse plug-in/RCP projects need. E.g. one of the next tasks will be cobertura integration.
Hi Markus, this looks really good. That's exactly the direction which I thought of. I'll have a deeper look at it.
Possible idea for PDE Build tooling?
Brian, in the meantime I had a deeper look to pluginbuilder and must say, this is exactly what I was looking for. Maybe the PDE-Team could work together with Markus on that.
I'm going to start thinking about this moving forward. I think as a start, I may develop some tooling to make it easy to have an automated headless build using product files (this is fairly trivial).
Bernd: If you're looking for a build for something you're contributing into the Modeling project (M2T or M2M, perhaps?), then look no further than yours truly. If I recall correctly from EclipseCON, you had some stuff that was stuck in the IPZilla quagmire which you wanted to contribute to M2T. Once that clears, let me know and I can help set you up a build using my handy template thingamabob. FYI, here's the process: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/EMFT_Component_Creation --- That aside, I'd love to see UI for generating a .releng project by pointing Eclipse at a bunch of plugins/features and saying "make me a builder!" My current process is to start with this code: http://wiki.eclipse.org/EMFT_Releng_Module and then customize that for JDK version compliance, 3rd party inclusion (build-time, test-time, or even packaged in the zip), upstream deps, etc. FWIW, I spoke with Wassim about this idea on Monday and he sounded keen to convert my template stuff into some sort GUI/generator. Of course there's a lot of customization that may still required even after filling in the template, but having a tool at least get you half-way or one that could propagate edits to multiple files for a single change (think MANIFEST.MF + plugin.xml, but for customTargets.xml, buildAll.xml, build.properties...) would certainly be valuable.
Is this on the radar for 3.5? I've just tried to set up a pde build, with the pluginbuilder and with the steps from here http://rcpquickstart.wordpress.com/2007/06/06/getting-started-with-pde-build/ . But I've failed miserably. It's IMHO a painful process which it should not be.
(In reply to comment #9) > Is this on the radar for 3.5? I've just tried to set up a pde build, with the > pluginbuilder and with the steps from here > http://rcpquickstart.wordpress.com/2007/06/06/getting-started-with-pde-build/ . > But I've failed miserably. It's IMHO a painful process which it should not be. My Summer of Code [1] student is working on a JET Wizard [2] for generating a whole .releng project from a number of variables. Hopefully that will one day find its way into PDE, though since it prereqs JET, it might not be until Eclipse 4.0 or may always be an add-on. In the meantime, there's a template [3] you can use to get up & running faster. [1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/GSOC [2] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Google_Summer_of_Code_2008 ("JET Transforms/Wizards for creating project meta data") [3] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Modeling_Project_Releng/Releng_Module
(In reply to comment #10) > My Summer of Code [1] student is working on a JET Wizard [2] for generating a > whole .releng project from a number of variables. > > Hopefully that will one day find its way into PDE, though since it prereqs JET, > it might not be until Eclipse 4.0 or may always be an add-on. In the meantime, > there's a template [3] you can use to get up & running faster. > > [1] http://wiki.eclipse.org/GSOC > [2] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Google_Summer_of_Code_2008 ("JET Transforms/Wizards > for creating project meta data") > [3] http://wiki.eclipse.org/Modeling_Project_Releng/Releng_Module Thanks for the pointers, I'll give it a try, but I don't want to wait for Eclipse 4.0, and [3] looks painful. I want rich UI to do that, a 'new' wizard, and an export wizard, and a forms editor, and, and, and I want it now! Thanks;-)
Benno, we love contributions on this :)
Benno, I do not quite understand how you used the rcpquickstart sample with pluginbuilder. Was the setup as described in the tutorial (http://www.pluginbuilder.org/tutorial1/tutorial1.htm) not applicable for your environment?
This is not something PDE plans to work on. This bug points to some alternate tools, so I will mark this bug as a readme. Closing as WONTFIX.
