Eclipse Headless Build Thought

I have been working recently on the build automation of our Eclipse’s project. Manually generating pacakages was boring, not safe and time consuming !!!!

Starting from web resources I quickly front of the part of the build related to the fetching of sources from a remote repository. In our case, we are not using CVS/SVN but Clearcase UCM.

Of course I can’t use ant GET target to fetch my sources from Clearcase but that is not a problem because I want to build the current version I have locally on my hard drive (== my working copy).

Eclipse’s help says here that I can manually retrieve my source within the customTargets.xml script (in the postSetup target). Fine !!! All I need to do is to use COPY ant tasks to “fetch from my lcoal hard drive” my sources into the directory that will host the build.

I decided to start to automate the build of my SDK feature. Starting from here I modified the postSetup target to copy my SDK feature and my feature (included by the SDK one) into the build directory. Then I had also to copy all the feature’s plugins. After long time  and several launch of my build script to see step by step which plugins where missing I finally was able to build my feature.

All this boring work (developers are lazy guys :o) ) made me think that it would be nice to have the eclipse.fetch target able to fetch plugin from a local directory. This way, as in the case of fetching from CVS, what we have to do is just says where to find locally plugins and features through a map file containing local paths. Eclipse will be responsible to get required elements to build the feature according to the feautre.xml file.

What do you think about that, anyone already reached this problem ? May be this feature is already existsing … ??? I guess the map file is read by Java code, I’ll try to step in Eclipse code to see if it’ll be possible to implement such feature …

I was wondering how Eclipse’s projects developers can build a feature using sources not commited yet to a CVS repository … In fact I guess they/you face the same problem I described … ??

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