I think it is quite normal to have more than one binary in a project. However, with Eclipse CDT I don't know how to set up the IDE to get things done.
I know I can create several projects - one per binary. And I know I can set the dependencies per project. However, I cannot regard them as one project in Eclipse. If I'd like to share the code with a version control system (like svn), each developer has to import the projects separately.
What I miss is something like the Solution (sln file) in Visual Studio. Should I create a single project and create the make files by myself?
I haven't tried it out yet, but there is this 'project set' which can be ex- and imported. Is this the solution? Can this be put into version control?
My goal it to put everything under version control, not only subprojects. I cannot imagine that CDT makes only sense for single-binary applications.
How can I work properly?
I am quite sure CDT doesn't support sub-projects, which leaves you pretty much with:
one workspace per "set of projects"
one project per binary (like you mention in your question)
project dependencies (like you mention in your question)
In term of version control, that means:
submodules (Git),
subrepos (Mercurial) or
external (SVN)
for each project needing a shared library project.
In short, that means putting under version control various components (set of files), with one referencing specific version of others (that list of specific versions of other components is called a "configuration", based on a component-based approach development)
Related
Is the file .settings/org.eclipse.jdt.core.prefs part of the project or is it part of my personal eclipse configuration?
Should I add it to version control?
Yes, you should. If this file is not under version control, then you cannot create reproducable builds of the same project, because it is no longer self contained, but depends on your specific Eclipse installation and its settings.
If you import this project into another workspace (on your or any other machine), it may behave completely different, as the compiler compliance settings, the compiler warnings configuration and a lot of other stuff is suddenly missing or different. Chances are high that such a project suddenly shows warnings/errors in the new workspace, while it was completely fine before.
Note: This all also requires that you actually configure all Java related settings in the Project properties. Never use the Java compiler settings under Window -> Preferences if you want to have self contained projects.
Just to give a concrete example: If you have configured your projects compiler compliance level to Java 6, because you are using Java 6 specific features (like Override annotations on interfaces), then the project will create a lot of compile errors on other peoples machines. This is because the default compiler compliance level in every Eclipse workspace is Java 1.5, and in Java 1.5 that Override annotation is simply not allowed.
This doesn't have anything to do with whether you are developing closed source or open source, as indicated in the other answer.
Contrary to #nitind's opinion, no. You should not put any IDE-specific settings under version control. Except you are developing IDE features or plugins.
In case you really have mandatory team-wide IDE settings, putting them under version control would be a good idea, but IMO having mandatory team-wide settings is not a good idea in itself.
For all other cases, shared IDE settings are bad for portable builds, even with the same IDE, and useless at best for users of other IDEs.
EDIT: I should differentiate, depending on the target group of your project. If you are developing a closed source product in a team that works with eclipse, then keeping these preferences under version control is helpful and a good idea. If you are developing a library, closed or open source, or an open source project, I consider ignoring the preferences more appropriate and polite.
EDIT2: I'm afraid #Bananenweizen is misunderstanding what I am trying to say.
I know that these settings are the eclipse compiler settings. They are still IDE-specific in the sense that they won't have any effect in Netbeans or IntelliJ as they won't have any impact on ant or maven builds from the command line.
Yes, leaving these setting out of version control can bring you many red wavy lines in eclipse on a different machine. It won't, if it's a maven project with a set source level by the way, I'm not sure about ant.
Eclipse is not building the projects by itself - it builds them with ant if it's an eclispe or an ant project, or with maven if it's a maven project. Both ant and maven have specific settings for the source version that do not depend on IDEs.
And this is where these settings ought to be - in the build file. And the build file should be under source control. The exceptions I mentioned earlier still apply.
EDIT 2020.03.15 #howlger informed me that the usability of these formerly eclipse-exclusive files has improved. They can be used in VSCode and maybe IntelliJ. This improves their chances of being useful across IDEs and may change your decision towards sharing them.
IMO, the files are mixing concerns. While I support source level and code formatting as being part of the build, I consider issue highlighting rules, save actions and similar concerns to be out-of-scope. If possible, I separate those, sharing the former by putting them into the build definition, but not the latter.
Here is the problem with putting it under version control....
If you import and open a project, Eclipse insists when IProject.open(...) is called on touching the file in the .settings folder... and this is before you can register the team provider on the IProject object. That means validateEdit won't fire and you get annoying errors whether you click "yes" or "no" on the popup asking "do you want to make it writeable?" That's all well and good for optimistic file-locking providers, but no so great for the "pessimistic" ones. For us this is just been yet another eclipse annoyance.
If it's up to me, there is no way I'd put these in source control.
The answer is "yes" and here you find the motivation for it and the proper way to do it: watch the talk "Committing IDE meta files: misconceptions, misunderstandings, and solutions." or look at the corresponding slides from EclipseCon Europe 2015 by Aurélien Pupier #apupier (Senior Software Engineer, Eclipse specialist).
I recently joined a large C++ project that where the codebase is housed in Clearcase. The primarly build system is make, which is also in Clearcase. The builds are unwieldy and long, so I would like to use the Clearcase plugin for Eclipse to select a small subset of files for an Eclipse CDT project I can use as an alternative build system for active development and debugging.
Is there a robust way to do this? The Eclipse setup is Helios SR2 running on Linux.
First, a general advice: use snapshot views, not dynamic views, for your compilation, especially if you need to access (for linking purposes for instance) large binaries: the compilation will be faster.
Plus, in a snapshot view, with its loading rules, you will select the subset of files you actually need to see and work on.
The other way to fasten a compilation (if you haven't the need to access large binaries), is to use dynamic view this time, but with clearmake instead of make, allowing for ClearCase to record the DO (Derived Object): see "ClearCase Build Concepts"
In answer to my own question, one can create a project by way of File > New > "Makefile Project with Existing Code". The "Import Existing Code" dialog appears where one can enter a root folder path.
When I commit a web appliction to source control should I also include the .project & .classpath files ? I don't think it should make any difference either way as other users who use the project should have the same project settings ?
This is the sort of question that gets people bent out of shape in a debate that never ends. You basically have two camps:
Only put source code into the source control system. Each developer chooses their own IDE and manages their own project configuration. Setting up your IDE after getting source code from the repository will be tricky. If one dev changes project dependencies, they have to explicitly communicate that so that all other devs update their project configurations. There are some tools that try to address this problem, like a Maven plugin that will attempt to generate Eclipse project metadata from pom.xml, but all have their limitations. Groups that go this way favor the purity of not restricting developer choice in IDE over the convenience of having Eclipse projects across the team that just work.
Standardize on Eclipse. Put all Eclipse project metadata into source control. This includes .project, .classpath and the entire contents of .settings. Basically, the only thing that you don't want in your source control repository is content marked as derived in Eclipse. You can check that in right-click->properties. Taking this approach ensures that developers can get started coding immediately after getting the project from source control. No additional configuration required. Also, when one dev changes project configuration, the rest of the team will see the same change on next sync.
Choose the approach that makes the most sense for your team.
For ClearCase, including the .project and .classpath can make a difference when you are using the IBM ClearCase plugin for Eclipse.
That plugin will work better if it can rely on those (versioned) files being there, right next to the sources (as opposed as being in the Eclipse workspace, which doesn't necessarily contains said sources).
In general, nothing generated should go into repository. Those files are generally generated by IDE or maven. However, sometimes you may need to click a button or execute a command to get those generated.
i would include them.
The .project file have plugin info (e.g. maven, ant, pdt, wst, aspectj, findbug..). It is essential if it is not a plain java project.
.classpath contain the classpath. it is needed if you use jar files.
I would say that all files - including .project and .classpath - should go to source control, to ensure that everyone in the team has the exact same setup.
What Eclipse specific files should I add to the VCS (Subversion, GIT, etc...) when sharing an Eclipse project?
What I have here:
.autotools
.cproject
.project
.settings/
Just stumbled upon this and had the same problem some time ago, so I will try to share my experience.
First it depends on who are the other users of the VCS or better what programs they will use. If they do not use Eclipse these files will only pollute their projects.
If they do use Eclipse the files might be of use to them, but in my latest project I did not include them for the following reasons:
Everyone had another system which meant other paths for the includes and so on. Concluding from this I surveyed the contents of these files to see if they should be used:
.cproject: The includes are listed here, so you will have different files in the list on each platform. -> leave out
.project: Found some environment dependent paths here too. Maybe it also has a problem when there are different plugins installed. -> leave out
.settings: It might make sense sometimes to share the settings but usually it is each developers own decision. -> leave out
.autotools: I did not use this, so I cannot say anything about it.
Summary
It seems best to leave those files out of the repository.
For Eclipse this introduces the problem of creating a new project when importing from the VCS. In this case you should give advice on how to configure the project to set it up correctly.
When you put the project files into the VCS those who do not use Eclipse will probably have less problems than those who do, because the files are simply ignored at their site while the Eclipse users will have to reconfigure them for their system.
Maybe there is some better way to share those projects but I did not find one yet.
I have a bit of code for a dll that is needed by two or more projects in eclipse. Currently each project has a copy of the code and builds the DLL separately. I want to separate the dll code into a separate eclipse project so there is a common location. But I want to avoid the situation where we have to build the dll in the one project, then copy the dll back to the other projects and check the dll to each respective project. This will create a dll for each project that isn't traceable to the exact code that it was built with.
Is there a way to somehow symbolically link the dlls to another eclipse project that is using CVS as the version control system so that it is possible to tell which version of the code was used to create the dll? Am I making this too complicated or missing something obvious?
I thought about working sets in the package manager for eclipse, but I have to investigate more on how to use them with CVS to avoid making it a nightmare for the next person who checks it out and can't figure out why their project won't compile.
Thanks.
What about creating a new folder in a separate project. In the advanced section of creating a new folder there is an option to link to another location on the file system.
Or you could also create a container project that makes use of a projectset.psf file. Have the projectset file link to the different projects in your repository. When you want to check out that project, check out the container instead and right click on the projectset file and select Import Project Set...
If you are working with one workspace, you end up with three projects, each mirrored in CVS: One is the dll, the others are the projects using the dll (configured as a project dependency of these projects upon the dll project).
With three projects I wouldn't aim for working sets - they are good for managing a lot of projects within one workspace, for three projects, I'd consider them overkill. I usually tend to aim for several workspaces instead of working sets.
Regarding the next person working with these projects: You need to keep some kind of documentation about how to setup your projects. You might say that your eclipse project files do just that (as they define a project dependency upon another project) but this is for the machine - humans tend to like other communication means.
If you are worried about changes to the dll being incompatible to one project (because the person applying these changes doesn't care about the other project), aim for a build server. This will build all projects and dependent projects whenever something under version control changes, run all tests, provide a build number and package it all ready for use. This way you can be sure that - whatever is in your deliverable - can be reproduced, because the buildserver is not able to make local (uncommitted) changes to the code. Also a buildserver will signal failure (either broken API or broken tests) at the moment of the last commit (well - a few minutes later) and place the burden of repairing the damage on the one causing the damage.