[CZT-Devel] CZT build infrastructure updates

[Andrius V. <an...@ve...>]

Hi everyone,

I want to share some updates regarding recent CZT build infrastructure updates.

The main change is that I have moved CZT Eclipse plug-in build to
Maven using Eclipse Tycho (http://www.eclipse.org/tycho/). It allows
building Eclipse plug-ins using Maven and fetches necessary
dependencies in Maven style. So now we can build CZT Eclipse from
command line, without actually having Eclipse running.

Due to this move, several other things have been affected:
- First, Maven requirement got bumped to Maven 3 (3.0.4 in particular
is recommended).
- Also, there is additional activity in the build job where Tycho
looks up dependencies for building CZT Eclipse (look for 'p2'
messages). This check happens on every build - if you want to avoid it
(e.g. when doing multiple rebuilds in a short period of time), you can
run Maven in "offline" mode with --offline argument.
- To build Eclipse plugins, run 'clean install' on the whole repo -
CZT Eclipse 'library' plug-in requires dependency jars fully built (I
am still looking into the best way for building this).
- Renamed Eclipse plugin directories according to Eclipse conventions,
e.g. to 'net.sourceforge.czt.eclipse'
- CZT Eclipse update site is now built automatically as well. After
build, you can point your Eclipse 'install new software' to your newly
built update site at
'file://<CZT_HOME>/eclipse/net.sourceforge.czt.eclipse.repository/target/repository'


In addition to that, I have done some steps to support building CZT
from within Eclipse IDE (my IDE of choice). One of the ways how
Eclipse supports Maven is using m2e (http://www.eclipse.org/m2e/).
However, it requires explicit 'lifecycle mapping' support. I have
added basic plugins to support CZT build - they are available at
<CZT_HOME>/eclipse/m2e and in the final update site. The full support
for m2e is not there yet - but CZT projects in Eclipse IDE are now
usable.


With the change to Git for version control and these build updates, I
have also updated INSTALL file to reflect this. It also has some
information on using Eclipse IDE to build CZT. I have written the
INSTALL.md file using Markdown
(http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) - it is a popular
format for such documents (e.g. in GitHub, etc) and recent Maven Sites
support it as well. So it should not pose problems to regenerate CZT
website for the next release.


Finally, there have been some other small build changes. For one, I
renamed some of CZT Maven plugins, e.g. maven-gnast-plugin to
gnast-maven-plugin. The new Maven versions reserve 'maven-***-plugin'
for official Maven plugins and ask to change the name to
'***-maven-plugin'. Check the Git logs for details of any other
changes.

Thanks,
~Andrius