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

[Miles Parker <milesparker@xxxxxxxxx>]

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.

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? I must say I do like that idea of having more build support!

cheers,

Miles

On Feb 24, 2010, at 7:24 AM, Ed Merks wrote:

> Guys,
> 
> As I mentioned yesterday, CDO has been converted to use Buckminster with Cloudsmith's help and Teneo is also in the process of doing that.  The Cloudsmith folks are offering to help convert a bunch of the projects over, starting with the projects in EMF itself, e.g., the core.  I'd like to see how that progresses.  Once all the subprojects of EMF are successful, we can look at replicating that success. The advantage of this approach, as I see it, is that we'll have a dedicated professional build organization to help us with our common problems going forward.  And in the longer term, we'll be able to easily migrate to b3 as that involves; a model-based build system!
> 
> Cheers,
> Ed
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