[cdt-dev] Heads-up to managed build developers

[Sean Evoy <sevoy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Guys,
I just wanted to bounce a couple of
ideas off the people who are looking at, and working on, the managed build
system. First, there has been an endless stream of requests to put a browse
button on path or file options. Since an IOption does not know what type
of list it contains, I am proposing a new enumerated attribute in the option
schema called "browseType". It will contain "none",
"file", or "directory" so the UI can properly decide
whether to display a browse button or not. So far, the solution does not
break existing manifest definitions and the UI is working properly. I would
like to know if anyone has a problem with this solution or if it tramples
on something you have already done.

What this does not solve is the problem
where the SWT/JFace widgets answer the file location or path location in
the OS-appropriate format but the tools require these specifications in
a different format. For example, imagine a cross-compiler hosted on Win32
not liking C:\foo\include, which is what we get back from the browse dialog.
This might require some further tweaking of the toolchain model to get
more information about the file system type the hosted tools prefer to
use. Notice how studiously I am avoiding the term "target model"
:-)

The window to propose alternatives is
small, so if you have any strong opinions on this, please let me know asap.

Sean Evoy
Rational Software - IBM Software Group
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada