[eclipse-dev] Stale projects and other problems building Eclipse

["Ed Burnette" <Ed.Burnette@xxxxxxx>]

I'm having fun trying to build Eclipse from the HEAD using Eclipse. I got it to work but I'd like to suggest some changes to make it easier for the next person.

I know there are two source build packages but they seem to be more useful for nightly builds and not day to day development. I tried binary importing all the plugins and then checking out the projects I was most interested in but often those changes depend on other changes in the binary projects so I have to keep widening the list of what is checked out. So after iterating through that a few times I decided it might be easier to just check everything out at once.

At first I tried checking out some of the modules at the end of the CVS project list (e.g., "jdt", "platform-core", etc.), but I quickly discovered that they are out of date (missing required plugins) and it was difficult to get all the dependencies. For example if I checked out "jdt" then it depended on other stuff which depended on other stuff, etc.. It would be helpful if there was one module that included all projects in the standard SDK install, not counting all the test projects. Anyway, I ended up starting over and checking out all the "org.*" projects.

Next, I had to throw out all the "*.tests*" projects and all the host specific projects such as "org.eclipse.core.resources.linux" since I was running on Win32. Some host specific modules that listed all the projects you need to build for one particular host would have been handy there.

Then I noticed there are a number of stale org.* projects in CVS; these threw me for a while. Mostly these are projects that have been renamed or dropped, and some don't build without errors anymore. Even if they could be built they shouldn't be included in the runtime workspace so it would be better if they were not visible in CVS. For example,

   org.eclipse.jdt.ui.vcm (vcm renamed to team long ago)

Some projects are missing files, for example

   org.eclipse.compare.examples (missing .project and .classpath)
   org.eclipse.swt.graphics.text (missing .project - actually all files are missing, and I do have the 'prune empty directories' CVS option set)
   org.eclipse.swt.opengl (missing .classpath)
   org.eclipse.ui.navigator (all files are missing)
   org.eclipse.ui.carbon (all files are missing)

Some projects have a questionable classpath that either references an absolute path or references some project I don't want, for example:

   org.eclipse.update.tests.core (references org.eclipse.update.core.linux)

Some projects I'm not sure about; they aren't in the current install so they are probably not needed, for example:

   org.eclipse.ant.optional.junit

Many projects build with warnings, which are a little worrisome when trying to track down a problem - should they be ignored or not? Most of them are trivial things like "superfluous semicolon" or "<p> missing optional end tag in exsd file". For example,

   org.eclipse.ant.ui (66 warnings)
   org.eclipse.help (18 warnings)
   org.eclipse.pde.build (20 warnings)
   org.eclipse.team.core (10 warnings)

Finally, the performance of CVS is sorely lacking; it takes many minutes to do an update on the 150+ projects I now have checked out, but the system monitor reports very light CPU and Network activity. Multiple threads in the team client might help there.

I'm not asking for a line by line reply for this mail; this is not meant as an exhaustive list of problems anyway. I'd just like to point out that if you want to make it easier for developers to build and debug Eclipse with itself there are some areas that could use some extra work.

Thanks,
--Ed