It creates some of the same old problems if we resurrect a
separate standard build system that does not interact with the managed build
system. This is why I would prefer to see a “core build system”
that all tool-chain integrations use, and then builder specific “extensions”
for builders that need it. The “core build system” would
implement the current “scanner discovery” functionality, by
integrating all of the possible sources of “paths” and “macro
definitions” and being the single provider of this information to the
rest of CDT.
One reason is that as a tool-chain provider I may want to
support multiple builders – for example both “standard make”
and MBS. When my tool-chain is used with MBS, I don’t need or want the
scanner discovery mechanism to be invoked. When a user decides to use
their own make file with my tool-chain, then I do need to run a “scanner
discovery” mechanism that my tool-chain defines. This creates
problems today and will still create problems with a separate standard make vs.
MBS.
Leo
From:
cdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:cdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Doug Schaefer
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2010 9:55 AM
To: CDT General developers list.
Subject: Re: [cdt-dev] Build Again
Thanks, Chris, I think we're getting a lot of momentum and
resourcing to address this. I can't wait to see what we can do.
I'd like to make sure we separate out scanner discovery from
managed build. These are two separate areas that shouldn't overlap. Again my
focus will be on resurrecting a separate standard build system where scanner
discovery is an essential mechanism. Reusing it for managed build doesn't make
sense to me and will probably simplify managed build if we remove it. For managed
build, all you really want is get at the compiler built-ins and there are
probably simpler mechanisms to accomplish that.
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 11:50 AM, James Blackburn <jamesblackburn@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Chris,
I agree with your summary. I (thankfully) have got rid of scanner discovery
here. The major gripe here is the issue of merging & version
controlling .cproject. The XML model bears little resemblance to a user's
intuitive understanding of the settings set. I've got a .cproject pretty
printer which generates a human readable output from the config, but the fact
that the .cproject changes seemingly randomly and non-obviously, after an
innocuous change (e.g. flipping active configuration) is bad.
I'd like to help out improving this and the scalability issues. I've got some
ideas on that front.
Cheers,
James
On 27 April 2010 16:31, Chris Recoskie <recoskie@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I would have replied to this thread sooner but
I was on vacation yesterday.
Rather than respond to all the different sub-threads, I'll summarize a few
points here.
As I stated recently, I think I can get a significant amount of my time put
towards build system work starting in the summer/fall, with the idea being to
release whatever changes resulted in the June 2011 simultaneous release.
Whether everything I would like to do can actually be accomplished in that time
or not remains to be seen, but it should allow for a good start.
To give some background, we've just GA'ed our first product release based on
our CDT/RDT remote development work... Rational Developer for Power Systems
Software. Basically it's a remote development IDE for the Power platform. Some
issues have come from our customers as a result during our beta program, most
of which surrounded scalability, build, and scanner discovery. As such we've
got the required momentum behind us to make some investment in these areas if
it will address these pain points.
As others have stated, doing a complete rewrite of everything would be ideal in
some ways but I'm not sure it's practical either given the resources. That
being said. we can probably rewrite a few things, and in fact in some cases I
think we'll need to if we want them fixed.
So, here are my main concerns and thoughts. A lot has been said by the rest of
you that I would say I largely agree with... I won't rehash it all, I'll just
add to it.
- Scalability of the build model is a big problem right now. We already had
customers complaining that they have hundreds of projects in the workspace,
which blows up the heap easily. Not only do we need to address the memory
footprint, but the slowness of creating and persisting the C project
description (and particularly the build model portion of it) needs to be
addressed. This slowness gets even slower when you are working with remote
projects, because remote I/O is expensive. I think the C project description
implementation and the persistence mechanisms need a rewrite.
- The elements in the current build model/MBS model themselves are not
necessarily bad as they do a pretty good job of modeling arbitrary toolchain
setups. Those elements can probably be tweaked to help to help address the use
cases where we are still lacking, without throwing the baby out with the
bathwater. I think even if I were to think about redesigning the build model,
I'd probably end up in a similar spot to where it ended up, with a few sins
corrected. So I don't think it's worth it to blow that all away and start
fresh. Most of our ISVs integrate to the build system using the MBS extension
points, so keeping that similar is something I'd consider necessary.
- Autotools support. Some of our bigger customers are using Autotools with the
IBM compilers. Building with them using a standard make project is really
clunky, and scanner discovery doesn't handle the autotools output properly. I
need to look at what the Redhat folks/Linux Tools folks have done to see how
that currently integrates. Does the autotools integration work with any
compiler right now or just GNU? Did they solve the scanner discovery problem? I
don't know.
- Scanner discovery in general is a complete mess and personally I would like
to raze it to the ground and salt the earth upon which it stood so nothing ever
grows there again. I got scanner discovery "sort of" working for our
product but it is rather hacky and doesn't work that great. Per file and per
folder settings don't currently work at all, and our customers care about that
(see: Autotools). The scalability of it sucks as the hidden build to get at the
compiler built-ins still gets invoked way too often for arcane reasons I have
not fully deciphered yet. Part of the problem is the scanner discovery stuff is
entangled in the mess that is the CProjectDescription and its henchmen, so even
if you sort of figure out your scanner discovery parsers and info collectors,
getting the data into the IDE properly is a nightmare.
- Scanner discovery working properly is REALLY important for us. Our customers
have all told us that our big differentiator that makes our product attractive
compared to vi/Emacs and the like is that we have all these great source-aware
features driven by the index. Our customers have really big projects though,
with lots of third party libraries, and they are pretty much unwilling to
configure the scanner info manually. The big customers pretty much all have
existing build processes that they are unwilling to switch away from, which
means none of them will be switching to Managed Build when our product supports
it.. So scanner discovery has to work right.
===========================
Chris Recoskie
Team Lead, IBM CDT and RDT
IBM Toronto
Doug Schaefer ---04/24/2010 11:06:29 AM---Hey gang, FYI,
As I mentioned on the last call, I've been asked to play a more active role
Hey gang, FYI,
As I mentioned on the last call, I've been asked
to play a more active role in TCF and help build a community for it and work
with you to bring it to maturity. That's taking most of my time these days as I
get up to speed and figure out what we need to do with it.
In my spare time, I'm working on bringing the
CDT to the Android community to help build native libraries for that platform.
The focus is on one of my dream projects, building a game engine out of open
source parts, in this case for Android, but I have eyes on iPhone and MeeGo
too. Part of doing that is getting the Android gnu toolchain working well with
CDT. And that's brought me back into the CDT build nightmare. Once again, I am
having a hell of a time getting scanner discovery working for these seemingly
simple Makefile projects. Just look at a stack trace sometime and you'll see,
today, the CDT build system is the opposite of simple.
So I am urging myself to get back into working
on a new build system. We need to put the architecture back to the way it was,
with managed build being an add-on, not having everything driven by managed
build. Obviously, I'm not going to have much time to spend on it, so by definition,
I'll have to keep it simple. And I'll have to do it as a separate stack, not as
an evolution of what we have.
Over the next few days, I'll jot down some more
ideas here http://wiki.eclipse.org/CDT/NextGenBuild. And I'll recreate cdt.build.* plug-ins, this time in
a separate folder to avoid confusion. And as always help is appreciated and
hopefully, I'll have new found vested interest in bringing it to completion,
especially since I want to get back working on the Android project.
Cheers,
Doug_______________________________________________
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