Andrew Niefer

The name of the ini file is derived from the progr...

2013-09-05T12:20:13.397-05:00

The name of the ini file is derived from the program name, see eclipseConfig.c/getIniFile.
The program name is take from argv[0].

On windows, the trailing ".exe" is stripped from the program name and ".ini" is appended. If the executable is the console launcher, and this file is not found, and the program name ends with 'c' (like "eclipsec" does),
then we also try removing the 'c'.

Nowhere in the code does it explicitly check for "eclipse.ini".

Except it doesn't work if you change the launc...

2013-09-04T15:36:16.208-05:00

Except it doesn't work if you change the launcher name and ini file. It still looks for the eclipse.ini file. Sigh. More proof that code rusts.

@Muller, I believe these blog posts are still rele...

2013-07-03T14:30:54.477-05:00

@Muller, I believe these blog posts are still relevant for recent releases of Eclipse. I haven't actually tried the examples recently so can't guarantee that they still work out of the box, but I am not aware of any significant changes that would invalidate them.

I have made the examples available in git at http:...

2013-07-03T14:28:03.388-05:00

I have made the examples available in git at http://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/pde/eclipse.pde.build.git under the examples folder.

One little detail that's still missing : the e...

2013-06-24T17:06:24.556-05:00

One little detail that's still missing : the eclipse window is not brought to foreground automatically.

Hi Andrew, thank you very much for this post. I wo...

2013-06-14T06:01:53.185-05:00

Hi Andrew, thank you very much for this post.
I would like to enable updates for a similar project and thus I have two questions:
- Are your advice still relevant considering building a product with Eclipse 3.7 / 3.8 using PDE headlessly?
- Is there a way to retrieve the sample projects (such as the ADT project) you provided? (I was not able to retrieve them following links within these pages)

I've used workspace names for a while now and ...

2013-05-07T05:00:37.885-05:00

I've used workspace names for a while now and this is invaluable when working with workspaces from multiple projects or branches.

For Mac OSX, there is a nice plugin called "OS X Eclipse Launcher", which also displays the name in a badge in the dock:

https://github.com/turesheim/eclipse-utilities
http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/osx-eclipse-launcher#.UYjPpSv5_CM

This is a good idea. However, I prefer to set the...

2013-05-06T10:39:02.859-05:00

This is a good idea. However, I prefer to set the background color for the text editor to something slightly different for each workspace. Grey is Kepler, green is Juno, Yellow is Indigo, etc (feel free to choose your own favorite colors).

Hi Andrew, it seems cvs link to example is not lo...

2012-12-27T05:37:26.764-05:00

Hi Andrew,
it seems cvs link to example is not longer available, could you please share example in some other way.

Thank you,
Dmitry

This method fails if folder contais binary (jar) f...

2012-12-07T08:33:15.140-05:00

This method fails if folder contais binary (jar) files. The tar (or zip) will be corrupted.
I suggest (tested) to add instead "output" attribute of exec element.

PS: in the ant code you should double '-' char before remote (--remote)

Just a help for everyone who tried Andrews good po...

2011-12-13T04:37:44.842-05:00

Just a help for everyone who tried Andrews good post to get the Git FetchFactory to run and didnt succeed, like myself (search for two days really).
The Git FetchFactory requires Java 1.6. If you have your PDE Build running on Java 1.5. you get strange errors where the CVS Fetchfactory is trying to interpret the Git Args in the map file and you wonder why.
But it just because the Git FetchFactory bundle doesnt get installed in Java 1.5, so for some reason the CVS FetchFactory takes over and I found that really hard to debug, but I finally go it to run.

Found out the hard way that the tag= parameter is ...

2011-11-30T07:29:13.594-05:00

Found out the hard way that the tag= parameter is required, not because of the code, but because without it the git checkout --force command will not update as expected.
So, even if you are building from the master (head in cvs) make sure you put the tag= parameter in your map entries....
tag=origin/master

The path= parameter is similar. Although things will act like they are playing nice, if you are pulling your code from the root of the repository, make sure you use path=. Even though that is the default, the build process will NOT work right without it.

Here's an example
[email protected]=GIT,repo=ssh://[email protected]:9898/somewhere/com_sombody_somewhere.git, path=., tag=origin/master

Thanks for the detailed explanation! I was looking...

2011-10-11T10:09:42.220-05:00

Thanks for the detailed explanation! I was looking why after product customization the open file feature stopped working. I wouldn't figure that out without this post. The appName attribute in the product simply didn't match the default one searched by the launcher.

Pretty cool blog...Was helpful to set up my own en...

2011-06-14T05:59:03.791-05:00

Pretty cool blog...Was helpful to set up my own environment. I put up a post to contribute to the Orion Navigator http://pradyutsarma.blogspot.com/2011/06/extending-orion-navigator.html

Take a look at minimaleditor.html and minimaledito...

2011-04-12T14:37:21.170-05:00

Take a look at minimaleditor.html and minimaleditor.js. You can hook up key bindings for save and undo/redo. Things are being refactored a little in the current milestone M7, editorContainer.js will be the basis for reusing the editor with more complete keybindings and commands. See bug 337647 for some discussion about this.

See bug 331122. Eclipse runs with the java vm eit...

2011-04-12T14:21:32.654-05:00

See bug 331122. Eclipse runs with the java vm either loaded in-process using the JNI Invocation API, or it forks a separate process to run java. There was a problem with the open file when running java in a second process.

As a workaround, you can force the java to run in-process by specifying a -vm with a path to a libjvm.so file in your eclipse.ini file.

It doesn't work for Linux 64 bits the first ti...

2011-04-12T14:14:13.350-05:00

It doesn't work for Linux 64 bits the first time when eclipse is started. If there is already an Eclipse instance running, it works fine.

For embed editor with "writable" class, ...

2011-04-09T10:25:39.459-05:00

For embed editor with "writable" class, is there a way to save the code after it was edited? Same for undo and redo...

There is anonymous read-only access with git ...

2011-02-16T18:12:15.143-05:00

There is anonymous read-only access with

git clone git://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/project/repo
git clone http://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/project/repo

I haven't been able to get the git archive command to work on these urls, so it looks like you would need to clone the entire repository and copy from the results.

Doing the second step as a product build is likely...

2011-02-16T17:54:46.330-05:00

Doing the second step as a product build is likely the most straightforward solution. There is some duplication in the builders, and perhaps technically some extra work being done, but this is worth it for simplicity.

You do need to get at least the features transformed into folder shape. This simplest way to do this is use the repoBaseLocation support or call p2.repo2runnable yourself.

How do I do the first step when I don't have a...

2011-02-15T09:56:22.034-05:00

How do I do the first step when I don't have a user on eclipse.org?

Thanks a lot Andrew! I got signing working and try...

2011-02-09T12:29:29.372-05:00

Thanks a lot Andrew! I got signing working and trying now to get my head around the product configuration thing. It seems that I have to mimic some PDE Build implementation details. I was wondering if it would be a better approach to not do everything in one step.

What about producing the signed "master" repo in on step. The next step would issue a vanilla product build which does not checkout any source but uses the repo produced in the first step. Do you see any issues with that approach? The thing that comes to my head is duplicating and synchronizing build properties (eg. configs to build). But the approach seems cleaner/easier. What do you think?

Take a look at the 4.1 SDK builder: org.eclipse.e4...

2011-02-03T16:35:49.694-05:00

Take a look at the 4.1 SDK builder: org.eclipse.e4.sdk/builder. In its customTargets/postBuild target it uses <p2.publish.product> to publish a .product file and then later calls the director for each platform and archives the results.

The tricky part is that product builds automatically generate some product configuration metadata for you (setting start levels, and other things). This is missing if you do a master feature build and publish the product file directly like we do here.

The Eclipse SDK build has done a little magic dance to create a org.eclipse.rcp.configuration.feature.group which contains this metadata for the Eclipse SDK. This IU is branded for eclipse and not generally reusable for RCP apps or other products. We are just reusing this by including it in our .product file as if it was a feature. (We are building another version of the same product so that works out, but for example EPP packages alter the branding a little and might not be able to use this directly).

Thanks a lot for sharing this. Do you also have a ...

2011-02-03T16:05:50.102-05:00

Thanks a lot for sharing this. Do you also have a recommendation for building products after a "master" build?

For our project I'm building an SDK feature. This produces a single repo zip with all the great stuff (source bundles, etc). Now I'd like to build products from this repo. It would be great if the product IUs could be published into the repo. But I think I also need to run the director somewhow after signing in order to produce the product zips, correct?

Could the be done as part of the running PDE Build or do I have to integrate this into the wrapper script? The Eclipse build does something like that but it looks heavily customized, though.

See Bug 334583 for the context menu.

2011-02-03T15:45:08.698-05:00

See Bug 334583 for the context menu.