Re: [egit-dev] How to build [EJ]Git?

[Thomas Hallgren <thomas@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Jason,
I think the essence of our agreed disagreement is well captured in this 
paragraph.

On 2010-01-07 16:27, Jason van Zyl wrote:
> Again, we will have to disagree because that just riles any serious build automation engineer. I believe that type of coupling is categorically wrong. I believe fidelity is required, I believe that the core logic should be shared, but it has to have started outside the IDE and then embedded in the IDE to provide the same characteristics. Going from what exists in the IDE that has grown out organically is a problem. This is why so many people have problems with automated builds in Eclipse because much of it is so coupled to Eclipse internals. I personally do not believe running a headless Eclipse instance is a sane thing to do for CI for example which I see a lot.
>
>    
The 'headless Eclipse instance' that you rule out is an plug-in 
framework with some bundles. How is that different from Maven?

One important difference is of course that this framework is built on 
OSGi and can utilize the exact same build environment as you normally do 
in the IDE. There is no separate installer. No redundant meta-data, no 
additional plug-in framework. It just works.

Keep in mind that the Eclipse build infrastructure is inherently 
headless. You only need a limited set of bundles in order to run a fully 
automated workspace build. The headless/UI separation extends to 
management of the target platform and also to the team providers. This 
means that the TP can be provisioned using Eclipse .target definitions 
and source check-outs can reuse existing team repository providers.

You advocate that the sane thing to do is to duplicate all of that into 
another build system and then maintain it separately. The reason being 
that you should support Netbeans or IDEA users. And OK, if that support 
is very important, then I agree that Maven/Tycho has a good position. If 
it's semi-important, then I would argue that if what's needed is a build 
system that builds separately from the IDE, why not use the 'headless 
Eclipse instance' to do that? It's there anyway.

- thomas