Re: Using Eclipse with Frysk

[Andrew Cagney <cagney at redhat dot com>]

Rick Moseley wrote:
> Wu Zhou wrote:
> > On Wed, 29 Mar 2006, Rick Moseley wrote:
> >
> >  
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > Someone asked on #frysk the other day about using Eclipse to work on 
> > > Frysk and
> > > suggested we add some how-to detail to the Frysk webpage.  I told 
> > > them I was
> > > using it, although in a somewhat degraded manner.  For a number of 
> > > reasons,
> > > Eclipse cannot be used to totally build Frysk, but it can be a great 
> > > help in
> > > writing/modifying any Java code despite what the emacs pushers 
> > > say.   :)
> > >     
> >
> > Yes.  I have similar feeling as you.  I found it most useful in 
> > reading Java code.  This can help me to understand Frysk's code.  :-)
> >
> > BTW, can you elaborate a little on why Eclipse can't be used to build 
> > Frysk?  Is the building process of Frysk one of the reason?  I guess 
> > Eclipse can't emulate the building process Frysk is using.  But I am 
> > not very sure.  I am very new to Eclipse indeed.
> That is pretty much the problem in a nutshell.  Eclipse does not play 
> well with projects generated with the "autotools" method we are using 
> in Frysk.  There is an effort underway within Red Hat right now on the 
> Eclipse development team to write a plugin that will make Eclipse more 
> friendly with autotools projects.  We'll keep an eye on that to see if 
> Frysk can utilize it.
Why wait!

Very early on I got frysk building from within Eclipse using a few basic 
custom builders.  I abandoned the effort when I found the Eclipse I had 
crashed before I could use it to do anything useful, hopefully that 
aspect has improved.

Given how simple what I did was (it was knocked up in a few hours, less 
if you ignore the crashes ;-), creating something similar should be 
easy.   For a reference implementation I'd look at CLASSPATH; simply 
adopting their mechanism may even be possible.   Of course getting this 
working may require a few tweaks to our build system, for instance:
-- autogen.sh's behavior isn't right: should also run configure; and 
handle a relative path
-- consistency between where eclipse and frysk put the jar files could 
save a few steps (but might also prove dangerous)

Andrew