Description Jacek Pospychala 2008-09-29 07:30:31 EDT

Recently I have spent some days configuring plug-in headless build and trying to teach others how to do this (during our famous Eclipse Summer School). Now it's time to share some experiences! :)
Before getting to learn about automated builds, I've heard opionons that it's difficult and error prone. This opinion should change.

First of all preparing basic headless-build setup is easy. It's just a number of well defined steps, that require copying right files to right folders and making few proper modifications (namely two variables in correct build.properties file). I love the Andrew Niefer's blog entry with ultra-condensed way of build setup: http://aniefer.blogspot.com/2008/06/example-headless-build-for-rcp-product.html

Second, my first and major problem was determining "what's the correct way" to do builds. Because there's a lot of blogs and suggestions how to start, but some suggest downloading custom code, other use modified ant build scripts or introduce new ones. This way articles or blog entries look simpler, but they're more difficult to compare with each other in case of any problems.

Third, setting up a headless build together with 15 other (people seeing PDE for second time in their life) in the same room we had of course some problems, but they were very repeatable. They were caused by missing or extra spaces in command line arguments, wrong directory paths, missing files, etc.

And at last, there's tousands of build scenarios. But there's just a few that everyone will really want to consider:
1. Build based on features vs. on plugins
2. Build based on ready files vs. from CVS
3. Plugging headless build into external builder (maven, cron, whatever)

So, what do you think about creating a PDE template that would generate working build infrastructure with some basic customization options?
It would help people set-up their first working build, ready for further customizations. It would of course still require some knowledge to customize the build, but at least would save us all from small painful mistakes.

I currently don't have anything working as described above, but just wanted to put down my idea somewhere to hear your comments. I'm aware of automated build infrastructure being developed by Eclipse releng team - but afaik it's more for Eclipse projects, than for everyone. I also have seen some bugs in PDE-UI bucket to integrate already existing solutions, but haven't seen progress so far. If there are other similar ideas, feel free to mark this one as DUP and move discussion somewhere else.
I'd be happy to implement whatever borns in discussion, as soon as I finish my other pde bugs (zx knows which ;P)