Building Eclipse from source

Question

I have been trying to build eclipse fetched from CVS, but cannot find where to begin?

Usually it has been simple, make X, build X, but I am not finding it that easy with this. There are hundreds of plugins, and I cannot seem to find where to build them all and have the eclipse IDE.

Is there any tutorial that will step me through the process? I cannot seem to find one.

Also, any way to automate this and make it programmatic would be huge as well, but I would settle for anything right now.

Dihedral

Answer 1

I believe the main document would be Building (from the wiki eclipse website), assisted with some PDE-build directives.

Eclipse itself is built using the PDE build infrastructure that it ships with the Plug-in Development Environment. Ant is used to run the build, with adequate plug-points where in you can perform custom tasks such as instrumentation of code.

Now, regarding eclipse itself, the releng project is the one in charge of the actual building: that link gives you some further indications on how to proceed, beginning with the installation of the releng plugin.

It is not an actual precise recipe, but a good starting point.

You have further discussions on that blog, including the use of ant4eclipse.
Pluginbuilder can also be mentioned as a tool which may be used to facilitate the build of some Eclipse plugins.

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12 years later, Aug. 2020, özkan pakdil proposes:

"How to build eclipse on locally in windows 10"

Based on:

git clone -b master --recursive git://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/platform/eclipse.platform.releng.aggregator.git e
export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx2048m -Declipse.p2.mirrors=false"
cd e
mvn verify -DskipTests

Biracial

Thanks for the links.. Having such an over-complicated solution for just building seems so eclipsy.. Any other projects I've seen just are trivial compared to this. If something is more complicated to build than the Linux kernel than that's a bad sign to me. – Churchy

@Mr_and_Mrs_D 5 years later, I don't have up-to-date information on this, but you can edit this answer if you do have some. – Biracial

I'm looking for some - will post a question if need be :) – Polynuclear

I am looking for step by step tutorial, can you recommend ? – Nashner

@özkanpakdil 12 years later, I don't have one, beside what I can read at wiki.eclipse.org/A_Brief_Overview_of_Building_at_Eclipse or etc.to/confluence/display/~admjal/Building+Eclipse+itself – Biracial

took me a while but here is a tutorial ozkanpakdil.github.io/java,eclipse/2020/08/15/… – Nashner

@özkanpakdil Nice! Good feedback, I have included your comment and tutorial link in the answer for more visibility. – Biracial