[cdt-dev] Mozilla now has built-in support for CDT project generation

[Benoit Girard <bgirard@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry if this doesn't pertain directly to cdt-dev. I was told this
list might be interested in knowing this since I heard the CDT is
tested against mozilla-central from time to time.

This week the last piece of the CDT project generation was merged in the
mozilla repo. This means that you can generate a project for gecko and
launch eclipse using only the following commands:
hg pull https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central
./mach ide eclipse

This gives an 90-95% working indexer. Most of the problems are because
our project generation is incomplete and a few issues is the indexer
doesn't handle the fancy (i.e. hacky) #include tricks we use.

Writing the project generator took me about 10-15 hours but it feels
very hacky and fragile. My process was modifying options through the
CDT and watching diffs to the setting/XML files. I wish there was a
better way generate and import build settings. The most challenging
part was automating the import a project to the workspace without
indexing it. The
generator is here:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/python/mozbuild/mozbuild/backend/cpp_eclipse.py

If anyone has any suggestions from the CDT side for
improving this or making this more robust, we would be interested
to hear.

- Benoit