[news.eclipse.platform] Re: External Plug-in Modification

[wegener@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Wegener)]

Bob wrote:

> Thanks to you both.

> My problem is that I really don't know how the FTP is done. In my debugger 
> dialog there is a tabbed dialog which lets you set up an IP and a password 
> for FTPing to a server. Unfortunately, with this version of eclipse (or some 
> plugin), they did not supply an input for the port parameter, especially 
> since FTP lets you do that on the command line!
Based on the above statement and your previous posts, I don't think Ant is 
even involved with what you are trying to FTP.  It sounds like this has 
something to do with a debug plugin for some third party tool.  What 
debugger dialog are you refering to above.  I don't know of anything built 
directly into Eclipse that requires FTP for debugging.  If this is from a 
third party provider, you will most likely need to contact them to ask 
if/how you can change the port.

> My caveman method of trying to figure out how to get another port was to 
> grep the source under eclipse plugins for the word "ftp" and that's where I 
> found FTP.java way down in the platform source under ant. Once I found that, 
> i took the approach that you have both seen me taking.
You found the source code to the ftp task provided by Ant.  This task 
allows Ant scripts to ftp to/from a remote host from a script file.  Its 
possible that a third party tool might use this, but it is also likely 
that the tool provider has their own way to perform the ftp required by 
the debugger.

> I'm confused again about the ant script. When I build my applications, I 
> just use "build" from the menu bars that eclipse displays which I assume are 
> from some plugin since eclipse is a collection of plugins (from what I've 
> read). The build script that you refer to sounds like the build for the ant 
> plugin. Is ant "built" everytime eclipse is started? Before I started all of 
> this, all I knew of ant was that it was an external build tool that I could 
> configure through Run-> External Tools.
Ant is a scripting package that can be used for pretty much anything you 
need to run from a script.  It tends to be platform independent, so the 
same script can be run on Windows, Unix, OSX, etc.  I believe that it was 
originally developed as a "make" like facility for building Java 
applications.  However, it has expanded to encompass all sorts of other 
tasks.  Like "make" it understands the concept of targets and 
dependencies.  A target defines a set of tasks to be carried out when one 
of the targets dependencies changes.  Ftp comes into play for things like 
deploying artifacts to remote destinations.  For example, ftping a jar 
file to a server after a build completes.

> Definiteley frustrating. The GDB debugger relies on this FTP client and 
> unfortunately the embedded system that I'm trying to debug uses a 
> non-standard FTP port. Just a simple port number.... urggggghhhhhhh.
Again, this sounds like a third party tool/plugin being used.

> Regards,

> Bob



> "Paul Webster" <pwebster@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message 
> news:eff5du$5tm$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > Bob wrote:
> > > [... procedure snip ...]
> >
> > Right ... that's what you would have to do to get it working
> >
> > > If you are tiring of this, maybe you could at least point me to a website 
> > > that has this procedure detailed. I have looked but there are so many 
> > > hits for these keywords it's hard to parse through it all. So far I've 
> > > found nothing.
> >
> > I'm not tired of it, I'm sorry I can't be of more help ... you've hit the 
> > crux of trying to replace a class in a contributed plugin ... how do you 
> > build the .class file (swapping it into the jar is just mechanical).
> >
> > But like Dave suggested, why not pass the port into the FTP task in the 
> > ant script itself?
> >
> > It's as simple as adding port="2121" to the <ftp/> task in the build 
> > script.
> >
> > Later,
> > PW