Headless build of eclipse features - PDE Tools or Buckminster?

Question

I am trying to set up a headless build for a big eclipse feature, containing other features and plugins.

As some needed plugins are generated using GMF and EMF, the build workflow must be something like this:

1. SVN Check-out
2. Invoke Generation
3. Run Tests
4. Build all
5. Publish update-site

Over the last couple of weeks, i played around with PDE Headless Build and Buckminster. Anyhow i still got problems with both and can't decide on which i should spent my effort.

So what would you prefer? What experience you made? Anybody out there who needed to set up a similiar workflow before?

Thank you for all answers :)

Answer 1

Buckminster sits on top of PDE build, so there's no getting away from PDE build in the near future.

You could try another free plug-in that sits on top of PDE build: Plugin Builder as it does the generation of the ANT XML and the nasty map file that PDE build requires. It even has the extension for SVN-based map files as opposed to CSV. I successfully setup Plugin Builder running from Hudson for my team's build needs.

Another alternative is to look at Tycho (Tycho is the OSGi/Eclipse related bit of the next version of Maven). It is a work-in-progress and it does use PDE build under the covers. I tried and failed with some experiments with Tycho, but they do have a recent new alpha/beta build, so you may have more success (and there are other people who are successfully using it).

Answer 2

The only problem I've had with PDE build is the map file for checking out. I wrote my own ant task to do the checkout for me using SVN, based on conventions on where the plugins are located, instead of having to explicitly state in the map file all the file paths. Worked wonders and now I can just add plugins to my svn repository and refer to them in the feature.xml and it just works.

Answer 3

We're building using buckminster(check out, compiling, testing and byte obfuscation). I haven't tried a PDE-script, but if you have a complicated setup with a lot of dependencies on other libraries/projects I think buckminster will scale better.

Answer 4

I've recently started to move our entire Eclipse build-infrastructure from PDE build to Buckminster, and I have mostly good things to say about Buckminster. While builds based on the PDE build scripts/templates tend to be very brittle and requires a large amount of surrounding infrastructure to work, Buckminster feels quite robust and does not require any significant additional scripting around it. Buckminster does take a while to get into, but thanks to the excellent documentation and the very helpful newsgroup, I was able to get a full build to work in a few days.

Buckminster is what Eclipse should've had from the very beginning to handle headless builds.