CBI/Eclipse Platform Build Roadmap

Shadow the PDE build

During the time period from Juno M4 and SR0, the CBI build of the Eclipse Platform will shadow the PDE build. This time will be used for testing and developing any necessary components necessary to ensure with reasonable confidence that the CBI built Eclipse platform load is the same as the PDE built one.

Bug 372792 - Status of CBI build for Eclipse Platform will aggregate the status of all known issues.

Cut-over

Release candidates for Juno SR1 will be based on the CBI-built Eclipse platform.

FAQ

Question: What does the CBI build of the Eclipse platform do?

Answer: The CBI build of the Eclipse platform is intended to produce the same output as the PDE build, and thus facilitate packaging without noticeable change. The noticeable difference the CBI build of the platform makes is ease of use to build the platform. For example, the prototype has consistently demonstrated that a newcomer without prior experience can build the Eclipse platform with under 30 minutes of effort.

Question: What is the link between CBI & LTS?

Answer: The Long Term Support program is aimed at enabling organizations to support and maintain Eclipse software far into the future, for decades if needed. Part of the program enables maintenance committers working on behalf of the company to fix issues. Ensuring a very easy to use, very easy to maintain, and portable build was essential to the program. The fact that a build with these attributes also provides much benefit to the community was another good reason to do CBI.

Question: Isn't this just-another-build system at Eclipse?

Answer: In truth, many of the technologies involved with CBI such as Maven, Tycho, Hydson, Git, etc. were already in use by a number of projects and being considered by others. Thus in a way, CBI is an evolutionary effort building on momentum in the community. Technologies such as Maven and Nexus (the artefact storage repository often used with Maven) are ubiquitous and very popular.