Re: [platform-swt-dev] gtk port

[Havoc Pennington <hp@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Thanks for the help, this gets me started. BTW, Jeffrey have you
figured any of this stuff out? You're probably familiar with where I'm
coming from (configure/make/make install), so can maybe understand
better what's confusing me. ;-)

"Veronika Irvine/OTT/OTI" <Veronika_Irvine@xxxxxxx> writes:
> If you want to run a standalone SWT application you do not need the 
> platform-launcher - this creates the eclipse executable which simply 
> brings up a splash screen and launches Eclipse via a java command.

Right, I don't want to do a standalone SWT app though, well, only for
testing purposes. End goal is Eclipse itself running on GTK+.  As a
starting point, I was hoping to get Eclipse itself running on Motif,
without using any prebuilt binaries. i.e. figure out how to build
it. As long as I'm using prebuilt binaries, I don't know how to deploy
my own modifications.

> If you just want to hack around SWT - you only need the swt library and 
> the swt jar.  Look at the project org.eclipse.swt.

When you say "look at the project" do you mean the CVS module, or a
web page?
 
> The splash_full.xpm and splash_basic.xpm are not part of the 
> "platform-launcher" or anywhere else in CVS - they are added in by the 
> guys who package up the build.
> You can get a copy of the files by downloading the linux motif eclipse SDK 
> and look in eclipse/splash.

Are there scripts used to package the build available somewhere?  I'm
assuming the build guys don't create a deployable Eclipse by going
into each subdirectory and manually performing the build. Perhaps
there's a toplevel build.properties file for the whole IDE with its
standard plugins?

The essential issue is this: for an RPM (Red Hat package), we would
normally start with all the source code, and run some sequence of
commands that result in an installed application that users can
use. So the question is, what's that sequence of commands, if it
exists.

> The build.properties are read by an eclipse plugin which produces from 
> them an ANT script and then ANT is used to build the jars and src.zip 
> files for each plugin.

So what commands would I type in order to do this? Or what do I do in
Eclipse itself?

In Eclipse itself, I could not figure out what to do in order to point
it at the SWT project. Say I have the org.eclipse.swt CVS module
checked out to /eclipse-cvs/org.eclipse.swt on my local disk. How can
I tell Eclipse to open that directory as a project, and recognize
build.properties? Or is ANT used from the command line? I found the
Import... dialog, but it isn't obvious to me which options to choose
in there.

I also tried browsing the CVS repository using Eclipse's Repository
View, instead of using a manually-checked-out copy, but the Repository
View doesn't seem to work properly in SDK-R1.0. (Clicking the expander
for a module just makes the expander disappear, exposing no subfiles.)

> All building of the libraries (swt-win32.dll, libswt-linux.so etc) is done 
> by the SWT team and the compiled libraries are released into the CVS 
> repository.  The code and makefiles for these libraries can be found in 
> org.eclipse.swt/Eclipse SWT/motif/library etc.

Right, I've figured out how to build the C sources with the build.csh
scripts.

> There are several articles about SWT on eclipse corner. See:
> http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-swt-home/main.html
> http://www.eclipsecorner.org/articles/Article-SWT-Design-1/SWT-Design-1.html
> http://www.eclipsecorner.org/articles/Article-Writing%20Your%20Own%20Widget/Writing%20Your%20Own%20Widget.htm
> http://www.eclipsecorner.org/articles/SWT%20Color%20Model/swt-color-model.htm

Indeed, I have enough experience with GUI toolkit internals that I
have no trouble understanding all that stuff (already read a lot of
it, and we've faced many of the same issues with GTK+) - I'm just
stumbling on the practical issue of how to build the software. ;-)

We (the GTK team) have been able to help the Mozilla and AWT
developers out with their cross-platform layers, so I'm hoping we can
help with Eclipse too.

Havoc