Pre-indexing documentation with tycho

Older Eclipses had this irritating feature of indexing help on first access. I think that many of you remember that :-). The issue has been fixed in Eclipse 3.1. Wait. Actually only the mechanism to do the indexing at build time was delivered, and all content providers should have used it.

The indexing at build time was usually achieved by two steps:
1. Declare an extension saying where your index will be created:

<extension point="org.eclipse.help.toc">
   <index path="index">
   </index>
</extension>

2. Ensure that the index is actually built via customBuildCallbacks.xml

<project name="Build specific targets and properties" default="noDefault">
    <target name="post.build.jars">
        <help.buildHelpIndex manifest="plugin.xml" destination="."/>
    </target>
</project>

The problem with the customBuildCallbacks is that it allows for to much creativity, which is nearly as desired in build systems as in accountancy :). Thus it should not be used. So, the question is, how to make it work with maven? I wish the answer was simple, but I have no other choice then present it in the most brutal form of xml:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.eclipse.tycho.extras
            <artifactId>tycho-eclipserun-plugin</artifactId>
            <!-- this is actually present in any 0.14+ version -->
            <version>0.16.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
            <configuration>
                <!-- this is to fix some lucene 3.x compatibility issue -->
		<argLine>-Dhelp.lucene.tokenizer=standard</argLine>
                <!-- actuall indexer call -->
		<appArgLine>-application org.eclipse.ant.core.antRunner -buildfile customBuildCallbacks.xml build.index</appArgLine>
                <dependencies>
                    <!-- list of bundles that we need -->
                    <dependency>
                        <artifactId>org.eclipse.ant.core</artifactId>
                        <type>eclipse-plugin</type>
                    </dependency>
		    <dependency>
                        <artifactId>org.apache.ant</artifactId>
                        <type>eclipse-plugin</type>
                    </dependency>
                    <dependency>
                        <artifactId>org.eclipse.help.base</artifactId>
                        <type>eclipse-plugin</type>
                    </dependency>
                </dependencies>
            </configuration>
            <executions>
                <execution>
                    <goals>
                        <goal>eclipse-run</goal>
                    </goals>
                    <phase>compile</phase>
                </execution>
            </executions>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

It should be read as: assemble an eclipse with org.apache.core,org.eclipse.ant.core, org.eclipse.help.base and all required dependencies, and then invoke the indexer. I hope this will be useful to someone during migration to tycho :-). Best regards Sources: Eclipse Help and Tycho wiki.

Should Maven be enforced by Eclipse Foundation?

I think I can safely assume that you are all accustomed to the idea of Eclipse Long Term Support and it's side product, which is Common Build Initiative. If I'm wrong, then you'd better start reading those wikis ;-).

The basic idea is to let anyone to build any project (including platform) by invoking a very simple command:

mvn clean install

No need to look for any dependencies. No need to check for any version. Just checkout the source and run this command.

Beautiful idea, but easier said than done.

The biggest obstacle is that some Eclipse projects were created a long time before Maven was, and customized their builds to the every possible limit. Some of them rely on the manual builds invocation, and store pre-compiled code in the repo (not only the native one, but also precompiled classes, which, as you already know from this blog, is a big problem for Fedora packagers).

So it is time to choose: should we preserve the pdebuild compatibility, which means that:

• CBI is monolithic. You build entire platform or nothing.
• CBI is not usable for building a single project.
• Either maven-ant-run plugin is used to bridge PDEBuild and Maven, or the build has to be maintained in two places.

Or maybe we should do it right by restructuring all projects to support maven, which means:

• Some work for projects that use customBuildCallbacks.
• Forget about the PDEBuild
• Easy projects builds.

The discussion is already happening @cbi-dev. Be there!