Developing Tycho

Importing the Tycho sources

For importing the Tycho sources into Eclipse, you need to have m2eclipse 1.0.0 or later (available from the Indigo software site) installed.

Here is the step by step approach assuming you use a Windows OS:

1. Get an Indigo version of Eclipse

2. Install the following additional software into Eclipse:
   • Maven Integration for Eclipse (m2e), version 1.0.0 or later
   • EGit Team Provider (optional)
3. Install Maven version 3.0 or later
4. Window > Preferences > Maven > Installations > Add... and add your Maven 3 installation; activate it
5. Get the sources from Github; there are different ways to do this:
   • In EGit, open the Git Repositories view, select Clone a Git Repository and clone from the location https://github.com/sonatype/sonatype-tycho.git
   • In a shell (e.g. from msysgit or Cygwin), execute git clone git://github.com/sonatype/sonatype-tycho.git
6. In Eclipse, use File > Import > Existing Maven Projects and the sonatype-tycho/tycho-p2-resolver and sonatype-tycho/ directories. (The two imports are necessary because there is no POM that aggregates all Tycho modules.) Install the proposed project configurators and restart Eclipse after the second import.
7. Optional: Select all projects, right click and choose Team > Share Project > Git
8. The result should be an eclipse workspace without build errors. m2eclipse may take some time to download required libraries from Maven central.

If there are build errors after import, you can try the following steps to work around caching issues in the PDE:

1. Refresh all projects. A jars folder should show up in both org.eclipse.tycho.surefire.junit and org.eclipse.tycho.surefire.osgibooter.
2. For the projects starting with "org.eclipse.tycho.surefire", select Maven > Update Project Configuration from the context menu. This should add a Referenced Libraries classpath container referencing the libraries in projects' jars folders (where available).
3. Remove the Plug-in Dependencies classpath containers on the projects starting with "org.eclipse.tycho", and re-create them via the context menu PDE Tools > Update Classpath.... After this step, the Plug-in Dependencies classpath containers should also contain projects from the workspace.

Building Tycho

In order to build Tycho from the command line, you should use the scripts in the root of the sources:

1. Edit bootstrap.cmd in the sonatype-tycho/ root directory and adapt the variables TYCHO_TEST_TARGET_PLATFORM -> point to Eclipse SDK 3.7.0 plus delta pack, TYCHO_M2_HOME -> point to maven 3 home directory
2. If you want to skip long-running integration tests, comment out line mvn -f tycho-its\pom.xml clean test
3. Execute .\bootstrap.cmd

Advanced Topics

Executing integration tests in Eclipse

It is possible to start the integration tests directly from Eclipse. Note however that you will still need to build Tycho through a mvn install whenever you have made changes to the Tycho code, e.g. using the bootstrap.cmd as described above. (Background: The integration tests trigger builds of test projects -- and these builds take Tycho from it's normal location, i.e. the local Maven repository.)

Tips:

• The integration test builds use the settings stored in tycho-its/settings.xml (they don't use the default Maven settings.xml). If you have special requirements, e.g. for proxy settings, you can edit this file. Alternatively, you can point to a different settings.xml with the system property tycho.testSettings.

Building Tycho against a locally built version of p2

Tycho makes heavy use of p2 functionality. Therefore it may be useful to try out patches in p2 before the next version of p2 has been released. With the following steps it is possible to build Tycho against a locally built version of p2.

1. Get the p2 sources (see Equinox p2 Getting Started for Developers)
2. Make changes in the p2 sources
3. (Temporarily) increase the versions of the changed p2 bundles, and require these versions in the tycho-p2-runtime.product
4. Build the changed p2 bundles individually with mvn clean install (a full p2 build with Tycho may not work; see bug 304594)
5. Build at least the Tycho module tycho-p2-runtime with mvn clean install

Then the locally built Tycho SNAPSHOT includes the patched p2 version.

Note: Tycho always allows references to previously built artifacts, even if they are not part of the target platform. Therefore you may want to clear the list of locally built artifacts (in the local Maven repository in .meta/p2-local-metadata.properties) after local changes a described above.