EDT:Developer's Guide to Getting Started on EDT

Objective

Working through the steps of this document will result in the following:

• a new development environment populated with the EDT source
• the ability to run EDT, with or without the Eclipse debugger
• an understanding of how the source is structured

Step 1. Setting up Eclipse

For brevity, we'll describe just one or two ways to setup Eclipse -- there are of course many more ways but here's the most common approach.

We assume you will be working with Eclipse 3.6 "Helios", which you can download from here. Eclipse isn't typically installed (especially since developers often have different versions of Eclipse on their system); it's just a zipfile that you unzip somewhere in your filesystem.

If you already have Eclipse 3.6, you can use that as-is but you may want to have a separate workspace for EDT. Just click File --> Switch Workspace --> Other; change the workspace directory to whatever you'd like and click Ok.

At this point, we assume you have Eclipse 3.6 running and are ready to populate it with lots of EDT source.....

Step 2. Loading the EDT source

At this point, you need to understand that working on EDT is the same as for any other Eclipse project, and which is described in the Eclipse Development process; briefly, there are contributers and committers. Contributers may work anonymously and are free to modify the source to do anything they'd like, whereas committers have been granted authority to work on EDT source as well as to integrate contributer's changes.

Access the CVS Repository Exploring by going to Window --> Open Perspective -> CVS Repository Exploring. In the CVS Repositories tab, click on the Add CVS Repository button on the toolbar. In the Host location field, simply paste the appropriate repository location string -- Eclipse will then populate the rest of the fields correctly:

Contributers should use :pserver:anonymous@dev.eclipse.org:/cvsroot/tools

Committers should use  :extssh:@dev.eclipse.org:/cvsroot/tools

Note that if you are a commiter, you will need to change the user and password fields to use the credentials given to you by Eclipse.

At this point, you should have an entry in the CVS repositories labeled with the repository location information you just entered (above) from which you should be able to browse the source. Expand the respoitory and you should have an entry for HEAD; expand it and locate the EDT source which is contained in a folder labled "org.eclipse.edt". Expand that and you'll see a collection of top-level folders like core, debug, gen, and more..... Each of these contains the plugin projects that we wish to load. Start by expanding "core" and selecting all of the plugin folders underneath it; right-click on the selection and choose "Check out" to load those projects into your Eclipse workspace. Repeat for all of the peers of "core" (like "debug", etc.) to load the rest of the plugins.

You can now close the CVS Repository Exploring perspective or simply switch back to the Java perspective -- you should see a large number of projects loaded. You could of course start browsing around the source, but first let's get EDT running....