[emf-dev] Re: [modeling-pmc] Builds: The never ending nightmare

[Thomas Hallgren <thomas@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Miles,

On 01/-10/-28163 08:59 PM, Miles Parker wrote:
> Hi Ed et. al.,
>
> I had a "chance" to play around a bit with Buckminister, because I wanted to do some product builds. I thought I had build all figured out until I tried to build an RCP product version, then found that all of the mechanisms for packaging and building are completely different! :( There was no simple path to easily turn a Hudson Athena build into an RCP build that I could discover. Unless one's idea of "easy" involves reading pages of Wiki and then hand-editing XML files for Buckminster. see for example: http://www.ralfebert.de/blog/eclipsercp/rcp_builds/. Their was a bunch of really fiddly steps needed to try to get a local instance of Buckminster up and running, including actually bootstrapping the headless environment from command-line, trying to figure out the inevitable plugin conflicts, etc... I finally gave up and just went with the PDE manual build. And in the end, its still down to a veneer over PDE, so you still really need to (try) to understand all of that.
>
>    
The way I recall it, you were using our bleeding edge 3.6M4 and reported 
an error which we then fixed in our next milestone. I realize that 
trying to be an early milestone adopter while at the same time having to 
learn about Buckminster can be somewhat overwhelming :-), but as I'm 
sure others can testify, we do our utmost to try and help our community 
and it makes me sad to hear that you needed to give up.

For the record, there is no longer need for hand editing our XML files 
in our latest milestone. We now have the EMF editors in place.

> OK, that sounds a bit bitter and I don't really mean it to be -- its just a too recent memory.. OTOH, I of course do (naturally!) think that model-driven approaches are key to this, and I think Buckminster has a lot of promise, but for my use -- already having an Athena build (finally) running -- thought I really wanted to be able to have a local product build for my own needs -- it felt like adding an additional layer of complexity.
>
> Aside from product creation, now that Athena / PDE can now spit out PFS, that takes care of poor man's development time provisioning. So I guess I'm asking -- non-rhetoriacally -- what the advantage might be for those projects already on Athena?
There's always the saying - if it ain't broke, don't fix it - and that 
applies here too. I think you should use whatever makes your team and 
your consumers comfortable. We would of course love to have you on board 
with Buckminster and will do what we can to help if asked.

> I must say I do like that idea of having more build support!
>
>    
And we would love to provide it.

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren