RE: [cdt-dev] CConfigurationData and friends

["Schaefer, Doug" <Doug.Schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> On Thursday 20 November 2008 14:56:40 Schaefer, Doug wrote:
> 
> > > Thanks,
> > > Volodya
> >
> > Sorry for the delay in responding it's been a pretty fun and busy 
> > Eclipse Summit Europe.
> >
> > We are certainly in need of help with the build components 
> of the CDT.
> > Essentially much of the knowledge on this Description stuff 
> has been 
> > lost.
> 
> That's unfortunate. Of all CDT, the build system seems the 
> most complex code to me, and if the knowledge about it is 
> lost, this doubles the complexity.
> 
> > There are guys trying to figure it all out and hopefully we can get 
> > some momentum back there. James seems to be having the most 
> success so 
> > far but we have a long way to go.
> 
> Do you know what unique features CDT build system has 
> relatively to other build systems out there? It looks like 
> internal builder is more efficient than external build tool, 
> because it can know what files were modified. But in other 
> aspects, I know some options that seems comparable, or better.
> 
> Maybe, it would be best if CDT included integration for 
> popular build systems, with one of such integrations being 
> "recommended" one? 

When I did the original work on the build model I had really hoped we
could build a system that modelled all possible tools and the file types
that they used for input and used for output as well as the options that
users may wish to set for those tools. You could then use build
configurations to set up different configurations of those tools for
different targets and things like release/debug/profiling. The internal
builder would then use that knowledge along with the resource delta to
figure out the commands to call and the order in which to call them.

For the most part, we have that. We've done some weird things though
along the way which is costing us with complexity. Toolchain objects are
one. I'm not sure we really needed that and it makes generic tooling
hard to integrate. The other is the project descriptor stuff. I think
some bad assumptions were made and a very complex framework resulted.

The good news is that I keep running into people who really care about
managed build. I ran into a few at Eclipse Summit Europe. Hopefully,
they care enough to come contribute.

Doug.