Eclipse CDT

Contributing

Please see [CONTRIBUTING.md] for contributing information

Developing CDT

Most developers, developing CDT in the Eclipse IDE, should use https://wiki.eclipse.org/Getting_started_with_CDT_development.

Command-line Build instructions with Maven

Eclipse CDT uses the standard Maven and Tycho workflow for building CDT using Maven 3.6.0 and Java 8. Therefore to package CDT do:

mvn package

and the resulting p2 repository will be in releng/org.eclipse.cdt.repo/target/repository

The current set of options to Maven used for building on the CI can be seen in the Jenkinsfiles on cdt-infra: https://github.com/eclipse-cdt/cdt-infra/tree/master/jenkins/pipelines/cdt

To build CDT plug-ins you need a standard Maven & Java developement environment. The Dockerfiles used for CDT's images are published in cdt-infra https://github.com/eclipse-cdt/cdt-infra/tree/master/docker. The requirements for running all tests successfully and for rebuilding non-Java parts of CDT are much more extensive than standard Maven & Java and include items such as GCC, GDB, yarn, Node, etc. Refer to the Dockerfiles for the current versions of those dependencies.

Profiles

There are a number of profiles (-P to mvn) to control the behaviour of the build.

cdtRepo, simrelRepo, defaultCdtTarget

Individual p2 repos can be turned on and off to allow building CDT, or parts of CDT against different target platforms easily. For example, you can:

• test CDT against a pre-built CDT by using the cdtRepo profile.
• build the standalone rcp debugger against the latest simrel mvn verify -DuseSimrelRepo -f debug/org.eclipse.cdt.debug.application.product

build-standalone-debugger-rcp

Using the build-standalone-debugger-rcp profile will include the standalone debugger, located in debug/org.eclipse.cdt.debug.application.product

skip-all-tests, skip-tests-except-cdt-ui, skip-tests-except-dsf-gdb, skip-tests-except-lsp, skip-tests-except-cdt-other

Using any of the above profiles can skip large sets of tests. The CI build uses this to parallelize tests. See https://ci.eclipse.org/cdt/view/Gerrit/

baseline-compare-and-replace

baseline-compare-and-replace profile controls whether baseline replace and compare is performed. On a local build you want to avoid baseline replace and compare, especially if you have different versions of Java than the baseline was built with.

If you have the same version of Java as the build machine you can run baseline comparison and replace. To do that run with the baseline-compare-and-replace profile.

Requires verify phase of maven to run, i.e. will not run with mvn package even if profile is specified.

production

Runs the production steps of the build. This profile can only be run on the CDT CI machines as access to Eclipse key signing server is needed to sign the jars.

regenHelp

Some of the help systems in Eclipse CDT require the regenHelp profile to rebuild their HTML from the source documents. For example, to regenerate the help for Autotools or Meson do:

mvn generate-resources -DuseSimrelRepo -f build/org.eclipse.cdt.meson.docs -PregenHelp

mvn generate-resources -DuseSimrelRepo -f build/org.eclipse.cdt.autotools.docs -PregenHelp

jniheaders

The jniheaders profile can be used on the core/org.eclipse.cdt.core.native and native/org.eclipse.cdt.native.serial to rebuild the header files for JNI natives. See also native property below.

Properties

There are a number of properties (-D to mvn) to control the behaviour of the build. Refer to the pom.xml for the full list. Many of the properties are not intended to be set at the command line.

skipDoc

Documentation generation for CDT can be time consuming. For local builds this can be skipped with -DskipDoc=true

skipTests

Running tests for CDT can be time consuming. For local builds this can be skipped with -DskipTests=true.

jgit.dirtyWorkingTree-cdtDefault

Running a build with uncommitted changes will normally cause an error. To run a build with uncommited changes use -Djgit.dirtyWorkingTree-cdtDefault=warning

dsf.gdb.tests.gdbPath

For running CDT's DSF-GDB tests, this specifies the path to the location of gdb.

cdt.tests.dsf.gdb.versions

For running CDT's DSF-GDB tests, this specifies the executable names of the gdbs to run, comma-separated.

native

The native property can be used to build the native libraries. Defining the native property will activate profiles to add the extra steps to compile the natives libraries used by CDT. The main CDT build by default will not build the libraries, but instead use the versions of the libraries checked into git. Therefore when users modify the sources of the native libraries, they have to build and commit the changed library binaries as part of the commit.

The releng/scripts/check_code_cleanliness.sh, which is run on the build machine as part of the gerrit and main build flows, will ensure that the libraries that are checked in are indeed up to date with their sources.

The native property can be one of the following:

• linux.x86_64 - uses local tools and builds only linux.x86_64 libraries
• linux.ppc64le - uses local tools and builds only linux.ppc64le libraries
• docker - uses CDT's docker releng images to do the native builds for all platforms
• all - uses local tools to do the native builds for all platforms

Therefore to build all the natives using docker do mvn process-resources -Dnative=docker.

However, the challenge is that dll files on Windows have a timestamp in them. To have reproducible builds, we need to have a reproducible timestamp. Therefore we use the commit time of the commit to derive a timestamp (We use the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environemnt variable to achieve this, see the Makefile for more info). Because we want to keep the DLL checked in so that contributors don't need to rebuild it all the time we need a way to have to check in the dll with the same commit time. To do this we use GIT_COMMITTER_DATE. So, after editing and committing your change, you need to rebuild one last time with the commit date and the commit it without changing the commit date again using:

1. Edit and commit change
2. Set DIR to the name of the directory you are working on, e.g. DIR=native/org.eclipse.cdt.native.serial
3. mvn process-resources -DuseSimrelRepo -Dnative=docker -f $DIR
4. git add -- $DIR
5. GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=$(git log -1 --pretty=format:%cI -- $DIR) git commit --amend --reuse-message=HEAD

The example for the core native bundle is:

1. DIR=core/org.eclipse.cdt.core.native
2. mvn process-resources -DuseSimrelRepo -Dnative=docker -f $DIR
3. git add -- core/org.eclipse.cdt.core.win32.x86_64/os/win32/x86_64
4. GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=$(git log -1 --pretty=format:%cI -- $DIR) git commit --amend --reuse-message=HEAD

As a CDT contributor if you are having an issue recreating the above flow, please reach out on cdt-dev mailing list or in the bug/gerrit you submit. A CDT committer can help ensure the native libraries are correctly rebuilt.

An additional tip is to set the following in .gitconfig to allow you to diff .dll files. This will show the timestamp of the DLL in the diff as part of the DLL headers.

[diff "dll"]
    textconv = objdump -x
    binary = true

When the host is Windows, getting docker to behave as encoded in the pom.xml may be challenging, instead a command like this will probably work (replace your path to git root). Note that running this in git bash causes problems because of the /work in the command line arguments. (TODO integrate this command line way of running into the pom.xml so the original instructions work.)

docker 'run' '--rm' '-t' '-v' 'D:\cdt\git\org.eclipse.cdt:/work' '-w' '/work/core/org.eclipse.cdt.core.native' 'quay.io/eclipse-cdt/cdt-infra-eclipse-full:latest' 'make' '-C' 'native_src' 'rebuild'

See also jniheaders profile above.