[PJUG Javamail] WG: headless Eclipse builds and deployment

[Volanakis, Elias]

Ted,

assuming your features / plug-ins have versions numbers in the form of "x.y.z.qualifier", you should be able to generate a timestamp in the qualifier part by setting the forceContextQualifier property in your build.properties file. More info here:
http://help.eclipse.org/help32/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.pde.doc.user/guide/tasks/pde_version_qualifiers.htm

Let me know if this works, since I haven't actually tried it out myself :).

Regards,
Elias.

> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: javamail-bounces at pjug.org
> [mailto:javamail-bounces at pjug.org] Im Auftrag von tkubaska at charter.net
> Gesendet: Freitag, 8. Juni 2007 19:53
> An: pjug
> Betreff: [PJUG Javamail] headless Eclipse builds and deployment
> 
> I'm doing these Eclipse headless builds. Headless in this context 
> means using Eclipse's PDE builder but not using it through the IDE.  
> People on this list helped with with this a while back (much thanks).
> 
> My question has to do with naming the resulting jar files for 
> deployment.
> 
> Eclipse (the program) provides a lot of support to do headless builds.  
> Basically what you do is set up a bunch of parameters and then push 
> the button. Most of the files (a lot of them are ant files) that get 
> run are automatically generated.
> 
> It turns out that you give Eclipse a parameter to tell it what files 
> to get from its CVS repository. This can be the name of a tag or just 
> HEAD. All the code to check out the files is automatically generated 
> (and you can't edit it, because the next time you run, these 
> automatically generated files are deleted and made again).
> 
> Now the code that makes the jar files is also automatically generated. 
> Each Eclipse plugin gets its own generated build.xml. Inside that 
> build.xml is a <jar/> task that makes the jar files. What I'm 
> generating has dozens of generated build.xml files and hence dozens of 
> jar files.
> 
> The automatic system uses the same parameter to construct the name of 
> the jar file it makes that it does when it checks out the files. If 
> you set this parameter to what you want the jar files to be named, the 
> CVS checkout fails because there are no files in CVS tagged with that 
> name.
> 
> What I want to do (I think I want to do this, but if it's too strange 
> then I want to do what other people do) is check out the HEAD (because 
> the HEAD should always be buildable and if it isn't I want to know), 
> and build the HEAD. If the HEAD builds I want to zip up the resulting 
> jar files and stick them on a site for download by our users. I don't 
> want these jar files with HEAD in their names. Rather I want their 
> names to have a unique name (like a timestamp, preferably the 
> timestamp when I started the build, which mostly takes under 10 
> minutes).
> 
> For a while I thought I wanted to get the latest tagged version, but I 
> don't think so anymore. The tagged versions are our releases and 
> interim realeases, not our daily builds.
> So they always build (I discreetly coughed here). I don't think I want 
> to save and tag our daily builds even when they work.
> 
> Here is a question ... do people save and tag daily builds that are 
> just daily builds? You'd end up with a lot of tagged versions in CVS. 
> A build only occurs if the CVS changes, but in this environment that 
> is just about every day.
> 
> What I've (through a lot of frustration) discovered is that there does 
> not appear to be a way of breaking the connection between the name 
> used for checkout and the name used for jarring. If there is, I would 
> be thrilled to find it.
> 
> The solution may turn out to be as simple as letting this automated 
> system build the way it wants to and then renaming the files at the 
> end. This would probably mean deleting the generated zip files and 
> then rezipping with the renamed jar files. This seems wrong.
> 
> So there are really two parts to my question. 1. Am I thinking of all 
> this in the right way ... that is, am I trying to do something 
> unconventional (I don't want to) and is there a more standard way of 
> providing daily builds to users?  And 2) if my goal is a conventional 
> one, how do people interact with these automatically generated files 
> to get the job done?
> 
>  -ted
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