Is there a SIMPLE example of How to use buckminster

Question

I don't understand buckminster at all. Lets say I have a project, and it needs log4j and junit4. How do I get started, what do I need to do, to specify the dependencies and have the dependencies added to my classpath in eclipse. Is there any tutorial which shows how its done?

Answer 1

I found buckminster brilliant, but terribly documented (I know, I know, I should contribute).

I was looking for something to build RCP products. I won't talk too much more about that, but I will say what worked for me:

• The "webinar" showed me roughly what I could do, and I found myself going back to it a couple of times to start with.
• Try to get your project checked out into your workspace. This involves:
  1. installing buckminster on your Eclipse installation
  2. creating a small CQUERY file, which is 3 lines of XML telling buckminster what to check out.
  3. creating an RMAP file for your projects. I found this dogfood2.rmap very helpful.

Thankfully, I am able to completely ignore CSPEC files, as they can be inferred from the existing metadata (i.e. from MANIFEST.MF, plugin.xml, .product files. I think it can work of the .project and .classpath files, but I don't _k_now). Similarly, I would ignore BOM files for now.

Once I had materialized a workspace successfully, I could go on to try and replicate that headlessly.

This article I found useful to create an installation for Buckminster suitable for deploying as part of our continuous integration.

At this point, I had a long think about the relationships between the Eclipse projects used to build up the product. We settled on a tree (sic) with two major branches - the product branch and the test branch:

• cquery points to a build.feature
• build.feature points to a product and a test.product.
• product points to features foo.feature, foo.ui.feature, bar.feature, bar.ui.feature. Each of these features point to plugins or features.
• test.product points to foo.test.feature, foo.ui.test.feature, bar.test.feature, bar.ui.test.feature. Each of these features point to test fragments that can exercise the product plugins.

By "point to", I mean the feature or cquery specifies it as a dependency. (I couldn't seem to get the Require-Bundle header in the manifest file to work, so put everything in the feature.xml).

I found playing on the command line very helpful at this stage. The resolve and build commands I found most helpful. I also found setting the output property useful here.

Once I could build (i.e. compile) everything successfully, packaging it as a product was the next thing. Using the perform command for an action (create.*.product) specified in an inferred CSPEC file generated from a .product file was hardly intuitive, but it helped to have a known good product capable of being exported as a product from the IDE.

The last thing I did was to find the setenv (I think) command, which helped set the Java version used to compile the code. There are a small number of properties you can set, but this one was the one I needed.

Other links I also found latterly, that look helpful.

Answer 2

From: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Introduction_to_Buckminster#Getting_Started

Hello World: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Hello_XML_World_Example_(Buckminster)

Answer 3

Hi, New Buckminster documentation is being produced right now. The first "rough cut" contains introduction (based on Eclipse '09 talk), RMAP and CQUERY fully explained, details on properties, and versions. These chapters have about 70 pages, and are in near finished form. More chapters and examples to follow. Hope to make a new draft available weekly.

You can get it here: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/tools/buckminster/doc/BuckyBook.pdf (6MB).