Revision as of 11:03, 14 October 2014

This page describes how to setup the Trace Compass development environment.

Note that this should only be required if you want to make modifications to the code or contribute patches. If you only want to run the plugin as a user, you would probably be better served by the stable or nightly builds, available on this page.

Get the Eclipse SDK

Under eclipse.org downloads, select the Eclipse IDE for Eclipse Committers archive. You can start with any Eclipse pre-package, but make sure you have the Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment feature installed.

Uncompress and start Eclipse. Example for Linux:

$ tar xzvf eclipse-standard-luna-SR1-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gzz
$ cd eclipse
$ ./eclipse

The first time you run it, it will ask for a workspace directory. You can use the default location.

You will then be greeted by the welcome screen, which you can dismiss by clicking the Workbench arrow in the upper-right corner.

Install dependencies

One additionnal dependency is needed in your Eclipse runtime to build Trace Compass, which is the Maven Eclipse plugin (m2e). If you know what you are doing, you can run Maven from the command line and skip this step. If you are not sure, keep reading:

• Select "Help -> Install New Software..."
• Select the current Eclipse release repository (e.g. Luna)
• Select (check) "Collaboration -> m2e - Maven Integration for Eclipse"
• Click Next/Next/Finish to install the packages.
• Restart Eclipse.

Get the source code for org.eclipse.tracecompass

First, make sure you have a Git client installed (either the git command-line tool, or the EGit plugin, also available in Eclipse's "Install New Software").

Then, simply clone the following repository somewhere on your hard drive:

• git://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/tracecompass/org.eclipse.tracecompass.git

Import the Trace Compass projects into the workspace

• Select "File -> Import..."
• Select "General -> Existing Projects into Workspace"
• Next to "Select root directory" click "Browse..."
• Navigate to the directory where you git clone'd the project earlier.
• It should now list the available plugins. Make sure they are all checked and click "Finish".
• The plugins should now be added to your workspace, and visible in the Package Explorer view on the left.

You will probably get a bunch of build errors at this point. DON'T PANIC! This is because Trace Compass needs additional dependencies that might not be present in your current Eclipse installation. We will install those in the following sections.

Set the Target Platform

Eclipse offers the ability to set target platforms, which will download a specific environment to run your plugins, without having to "pollute" your Eclipse install. Trace Compass ships target definition files, which is the recommended way of installing its dependencies.

To set the target platform for the Trace Compass plugins:

• Expand the "org.eclipse.tracecompass.target" project.
• Double-click the .target file that corresponds to your Eclipse version (tracecompass-e4.4.target, at the time of this writing).
• In the view that just opened, click Set as Target Platform on the top right.

Eclipse will now download the required dependencies, which may take some time the first time.

If you wish to switch target platforms in the future, you can come back to this plugin, or you can go to "Window -> Preferences -> Plug-in Development -> Target Platform". From that page, you can switch between any of the known targets, or your base Eclipse runtime.

Generate the CTF parser files

You will probably still have some build errors. This is because the CTF parser files are missing, and need to be generated from the grammar files. Unfortunately, there is no simple, platform-agnostic way to build those from Eclipse, since the version of Antlr shipped in Orbit only contains the runtime, and not the tool to generate Java files. This is where m2e comes into play:

First, we need to build the target project so that maven can find the dependencies:

• Expand the "org.eclipse.tracecompass.target" project.
• Right-click the "pom.xml" file (should be a direct child of the project folder itself).
• Select "Run As -> Maven install" (not "Maven build", "install"!)
• You should see the Maven output in the console, which should hopefully finish with a BUILD SUCCESSFUL message.

Then we can build the parser project:

• Expand the "org.eclipse.linuxtools.ctf.parser" project.
• Right-click the "pom.xml" file (should be a direct child of the project folder itself).
• Select "Run As -> Maven install" (not "Maven build", "install"!)
• You should see the Maven output in the console, which should hopefully finish with a BUILD SUCCESSFUL message.

Note that m2e behaves like a Maven client, which means it will ignore most of Eclipse's settings and use its own settings.xml file. For instance, if you need to configure a proxy, it will need to be set in that file. You can read more about the settings.xml file here.

Alternatively, if you have "antlr3" installed on your system, you can use the "generate-grammar.sh" script to achieve the same result.

Once the parser is built, if the other projects didn't refresh, you can force a refresh manually (Collapse All, shift+click to select all the plugins, then press F5). The errors should all disappear.

If you ever run a git clean, or if you make modifications to the CTF grammar (.g) files, you will need to regenerate these files using the same method.

Build the documentation (optional)

If you imported the *.help plugins (which contain the user and developer guides), you might notice warnings in these plugins because of missing files. Similarly to the CTF parser, the documentation plugins need to be built using a separate component. If you do not care for the documentation, you can ignore those warnings, or even remove those plugins from your workspace.

On the other hand, if you want to build or work on the documentation (which you should do if you add user-visible features!), here is how to build it.

First you need to install the Mylyn-Wikitext Eclipse plugin:

• Go to "Help -> Install New Software..."
• Select "-- All Available Sites--"
• In the list of available plugins, select "Collaboration -> Mylyn Wikitext", and click Next/Finish to install it.
• Restart Eclipse

You can now build the documentation plugins:

• Click on one of the *.help projects
• In the top menu, click "Project -> Build Project"
• After it is built, the warning should disappear, and the HTML files should be present in its doc/ subdirectory.

Note that this builder does not run automatically ; Ant is not very smart at figuring out which files were changed, so it would end up constantly rebuilding the doc plugins for nothing. For this reason, if you modify the source (.mediawiki) files, you will have to rebuild the HTML manually, using the same method.

Run (or Debug) the plugins

To run (or debug) the code, start a nested Eclipse with the plugins loaded:

• Right-click the "org.eclipse.tracecompass.tmf.core" plugin
• Select "Run As -> Eclipse Application" (or "Debug As -> Eclipse Application" to run in debug mode).

The next time you can just select "Eclipse Application" from the Run (or Debug) icon in the toolbar.