I have been trying to build eclipse fetched from CVS, but cannot find where to begin?
Usually it has been simple, make X, build X, but I am not finding it that easy with this. There are hundreds of plugins, and I cannot seem to find where to build them all and have the eclipse IDE.
Is there any tutorial that will step me through the process? I cannot seem to find one.
Also, any way to automate this and make it programmatic would be huge as well, but I would settle for anything right now.
I believe the main document would be Building (from the wiki eclipse website), assisted with some PDE-build directives.
Eclipse itself is built using the PDE build infrastructure that it ships with the Plug-in Development Environment. Ant is used to run the build, with adequate plug-points where in you can perform custom tasks such as instrumentation of code.
Now, regarding eclipse itself, the releng project is the one in charge of the actual building: that link gives you some further indications on how to proceed, beginning with the installation of the releng plugin.
It is not an actual precise recipe, but a good starting point.
You have further discussions on that blog, including the use of ant4eclipse.
Pluginbuilder can also be mentioned as a tool which may be used to facilitate the build of some Eclipse plugins.