[imp-dev] Documentation of IMP build specs?

[Stan Sutton <suttons@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

There has been a minor problem with
the New Preferences Specification wizard, that is, it has been showing
up in the New menu without an icon.  I finally decided to try to track
down the cause.  The extension for that wizard identifies an icon,
and the icon folder and file actually exist in the project, but they weren't
showing up in the released version of the plug-in.  I checked the
build properties for the plug-in, and, indeed, the "icons" folder
wasn't checked to be part of the build.  (So now it's checked and
now I expect the icon to start showing up with the next release.)

While I was looking at the preferences
build specs I though I'd compare them to the build specs of other new-wizard-contributing
plug-ins (e.g., lpg metatooling and imp metatooling), and I noticed that
there were some differences between these specifications.  Some of
these may relate to differences in things that are available from different
projects, but some relate to things that are available in all of the projects.
 Anyway, I can't tell from staring at the build properties which things
belong in which build specs and which differences are appropriate and which
are not.  So it might be nice to have that documented somewhere.

The correctness of build specs was also
an issue when we moved onto Eclipse 3.4.  Some of our plug-ins had
problems running on 3.4 even after most of the necessary patches were made
to various parts of the code.  These plug-ins had Eclipse warnings
in their build properties.  Once I resolved those properties, a number
of runtime problems went away.  So this was another respect in which
the correctness of the build properties was important--although Eclipse
was helpful in this case.

My own beliefs about what belongs in
the build properties is very rudimentary.  It's based partly on logic,
partly on experience, and partly on superstition.  If people who have
suggestions about what we should or should not be including in various
bin and src builds want to send me suggestions, I'll be happy to compile
them into a document that we can all review and post on the web site.

Regards,

Stan

Stan Sutton, Ph. D.
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
19 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532 USA
telephone:  1-914-784-7316, FAX:  1-914-784-7455, T/L 863
e-mail:  suttons@xxxxxxxxxx, Stan Sutton/Watson/IBM@IBMUS