Gareth,
The Autotools plugin is very much in its infancy. There are no firm
plans regarding how it will be released.
Andrew and Ben have discussed the project briefly with the CDT folks
at EclipseCon and there is reportedly interest in pushing the work into
the CDT. Obviously, that is a preferred strategy. We can make it much
leaner and cleaner with the CDT folks' help. I haven't started a
serious dialog with the CDT folks yet, but it is certainly on my TODO list.
At the moment, the project is a hack with us basing ourselves on a
Managed Make project and stodifying pieces of Std Make (e.g. Make target
support). This approach was taken mostly because a Managed Make project
had an extension for Makefile generation which we matched up with
configuration. The Std Make project has Make Target support which is a
must-have feature when dealing with all the myriad of existing projects.
Our target is existing Open Source C/C++ projects. Complex projects
with history behind them. I am the head maintainer of newlib and so my
first goal was to get newlib to configure/build/install from within the
CDT (done, btw). Newlib has some interesting problems and I am sure
there are many other projects out there that will prove to be even more
challenging.
Short-term has been essentially hacking together a working model
which we are building upon and refining. We have not ironed out what
the full feature-set will look like and definitely want to solicit
requirements. At present, you check out an Open Source project, then in
a separate step, you convert it to an Autotools C/C++ project
(New..Other). Through project properties, you can set up your
configuration options, where the build ends up (currently, defaults to
build subdirectory), include path, and various CDT Managed Make options.
The include path is required to get the indexing to work properly.
Once this is done, you can add Make targets via <Build Special Targets>,
which has been added to the project menu. This feature corresponds
directly with Create Make Target/Build Make Target for a Std Make
project, but we couldn't use that once we had chosen the Managed Make
base. Workarounds of this type are things the CDT folks can help us
clean up. If you choose the default Rebuild Project, etc.. you are
dealing with the standard "all" and "clean" make targets. Configuration
is done for you (including autogen support) and the results are stored
in a separate console. I just added help docs for the Gnu tools (gcc,
binutils, automake, autoconf). There are definitely warts, but it is
starting to take shape and you can easily see its potential.
Long-term, we would like to see development of C/C++ Open Source
projects see some more of the benefits that Java programmers have. One
of the key changes I would like to see is live compilation/parsing as
you get for Java. If we could eliminate typos, flag missing
declarations and illegal operations, or suggest include files, then the
CDT ends up being a helpful tool to Open Source C/C++ development. We
have had brief discussions with gcc folks here to see what it would take
to have the compiler help with sort of thing, but it is large
undertaking. Another possibility would be to attack this problem from
the indexing side. For all I know, the CDT folks are already examining
this. Again, long term, but important to start now.
I hope this clarifies things a bit. I will be updating the web-page
shortly to provide a lot more details than is presently there.
-- Jeff J.
From: "Foster, Gareth" <gareth.foster@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: fedora-devel-java-list@xxxxxxxxxx
> X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2657.72)
> Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2006 17:00:58 +0100
> Subject: [fedora-java] Autotools?
>
> Hello list,
>
> This is a pretty open ended question really. Autotools plugin? Going in
> extras for FC5? Only going in FC6? Abandoned? Subject to furious hacking?
> Picked up code from Kdevelop?
>
> They are all questions people would be interested in having the
answers to.
> How about a status update or roadmap? As a reply to this, or maybe as a
> gnomedesktop.org post?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Gaz
>
> --
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>
