Re: [pde-build-dev] PDE Build and RCP - my observations

[Andrew.Ferguson@xxxxxxxxxxx]

hi,

> It seems to me that there is a lot of room for
error in this system.
> What are your thoughts on these issues? Am I making a mountain out
of
> a molehill? Is it just the job of a build engineer to do all of this?

I've played with having a small/medium project be
built and tested using the pde infrastrucure. It
works well but I'd certainly agree there is a lot
of room for improvement for projects that need little custom build steps.

It seems like the current setup is very customizable
and powerful, but that this complexity is not hidden from users who have
simpler build requirements. 

For example, ideally it'd be good to provide the minimal
information (in one file)
        (a) what version
of eclipse to build against
        (b) a list of
plug-in ids and version numbers
        (c) a location
in source control where these can be found (and have it assumed the plug-ins
map uniformally to that location)

and for testing have a scheme where
        (a) its assumed
test plugins will be the same as in (b) above, but with ".tests"
on the end of id
        (b) any test suites
that are found as part of the ".tests" plugins are automatically
added to the list of things to test

(I'm not sure testing is strictly part of the pde-build
infrastructure? maybe TPTP provides a better infrastructure)

At the moment there is a lot of information that is
redundant, and explicit (when it could be implicit from the pde-build user's
point of view). For example, if you have a few different builders, then
you'll either end up with several very similar build.properties, customTargets.xml
and maybe allElements.xml files.

Independently of these issues, there is also an issue
that when something does go wrong, the error messages produced often don't
help point towards the actual problem. For example, if a plug-in dependency
isn't satisfied then the error message would report that the plug-in had
not been found, without saying which dependency was not present.

I've seen some bugzillas against either the build
or test (sorry I can't remember which) that say ant scripts with sections
for the user to fill would be better replaced with custom ant tasks, which
would be a big improvement too.

thanks,
Andrew

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