Source builds

[mculpepper]

Hey guys...

I've been playing with IDE source builds, and it looks like this is going to require all the plugins to have their source build properties setup correctly.

It's pretty easy to do, the problem is that it's just not done by default.. Do you guys think you can put this on your to-do list for this week so we can have a accompanying source bundle with our 1.5.1 release?

[koen.aers]

I played with this last week, but I did not get it to work properly... :-(
Do you have an example?

[maxandersen]

afaik hibernatetools have always been ready for source builds. Let me know if it doesnt do what you expect ;)

[mculpepper]

Ok.. I've been spending _way_ too much time trying to make source builds work today... I'm hoping that one of you guys has some pointers because I'm at the end of my rope here ;).

Basically, here are my findings:
1) Obviously you first need to make sure all your plugins have the source build configuration setup. Check.
2) This is where things start getting hazy. You need to figure out if you want to either generate (there seems to be no reason for wanting one of these over the other??):

a) A source feature with a source plugin. You're basically supposed to create a template plugin and feature inside the feature who's source you want to make. But then you're supposed to include the "generated" feature as part of your original feature.. meaning that you will probably need to encapsulate everything in a special "sdk" feature so as not to include source by default in your main feature. Things aren't even confusing yet.

b) A standalone source plugin. Again, I'm really not sure what the difference is here, other than you have already created the feature. You are supposed to include the plugin inside your source feature, and add a "generate.plugin" property inside the build.properties.

After trying both of these methods for the past few hours I can safely say that nothing I've tried is working... I've even devolved into looking at Eclipse CVS and trying to get a working example from something that already works but it's hopeless.. every single source/sdk feature under eclipse CVS does things COMPLETELY different! some have a source feature that's supposed to be generated (you'll know because it has a "sourceTemplateFeature" folder), yet the feature.xml has already been written. the docs say the feature.xml is generated for you?!? some features (see org.eclipse.jdt.sdk) _only_ have the "generate.feature" property in the top level build.properties along with a feature.xml, and _no_ template directories. there is no method to the madness, and no matter which i try, i'm ending up with all kinds of weirdness (for instance, i've specifically told eclipse to generate "org.jboss.ide.eclipse.source" feature, yet for some reason i'm getting "org.jboss.ide.eclipse.feature.source" .. what the hell is going on? and why isn't there any actual source code??)

when trying to take the "easy" route and just go with a generated source plugin, eclipse build complains that it can't find the plugin it's supposed to generate... it's ridiculous!

anyway, i hope my babbling isn't completely incoherent but i needed to vent it all and hopefully get some feedback, because this just isn't making sense to me. i'm about _this_ close to writing a custom source packaging solution for our build system.. eclipse's "magic" stuff is wearing out my patience.