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Re: [platform-swt-dev] the build

Mike_Wilson@xxxxxxx writes:
> These are good comments, Havoc. What do you think would be the *best* way 
> to make this work (and can you help us set it up ;-).
> 

I would say the best possible thing would be to have Eclipse's build
infrastructure work in command line mode as well, and be powerful
enough to encompass the C/JNI targets and the various
platform-specific targets of SWT.

So then if I check out Eclipse in Eclipse, Eclipse can just look at
the build.properties or other files belonging to the build system, and
figure out all the necessary info to Just Work on all platforms.

If I check out Eclipse using CVS command line, I'd first bootstrap and
install the build system component (ANT, right?) using some simple
script or the like, then run the ANT equivalent of "make" to build
everything else.

The virtue of doing it this way is that you stay self-hosting (dogfood
and all that) and you don't have IDE users and Emacs users using
different build setups and hosing each other all the time. ;-)

But, if the above is prohibitive from an engineering standpoint, you
could use autotools - I'm the first to complain about them, but as the
old saying goes, they're the worst thing ever except all the other
options. ;-) I think Anthony was already setting up the auto* stuff -
I don't know if it handles regular Java in addition to gcj though.

The big problem with auto* however is that if some people use that and
some use Eclipse itself then people will often accidentally break the
build setup they aren't using. I know in GTK we have Windows makefiles
and UNIX makefiles and the UNIX people are always breaking things on
Windows.

Havoc



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