Notes on building, running and releasing PG Eclipse

These notes assume you have checked out the project source from CVS according to PGEclipseSources. You should have =ed.inf.proofgeneral- as a package inside your Eclipse development environment. To avoid confusion, make sure that the PG plugin is not already enabled in this Eclipse. You can check and disable or uninstall it via Help -> Manage Configuration.

See also the README.txt in the distribution.

Building and running it

Here is the easiest way to run in the runtime workbench (i.e. a second copy of Eclipse with the PG plugin installed):

1. open plugin.xml by double clicking it
2. click on Launch application or Launch Debug.

Debug mode connects back to the main Eclipse instance and allows crafty dynamic updates of installed classes in the runtime instance as you develop.

Run configurations

The button above uses a default run configuration. You can define others by:

1. Choose Run/Debug from Run menu
2. Select application: org.eclipse.ui.ide.workbench
3. Make sure that ed.inf.proofgeneral plugin is included

You can also run the product which is defined in pgeclipse.product. But at the moment, this is not the same as the released product (it is based on the plugin, rather than a "feature").

Releasing: the Proof General features and update site

These are managed with two packages kept in a different place in the CVS repository, at:

eclipse/ed.inf.proofgeneral.feature

eclipse/ed.inf.proofgeneral.update-site

Instructions are included in the README of the update site project. These packages are only likely to be of interest for local developers with DICE accounts who can update the web pages. Other developers or users should drop a note when they'd like to see an update.

Notes on packaging products

The most basic mechanism is to release a deployable plugin which can be installed into an Eclipse based product (e.g. the Eclipse platform itself).

An Eclipse product is a standalone application which launching infrastructure and all required plugins. This is the main way we distribute Eclipse Proof General, in the PGEclipse product. It's the simplest for users because they only need to download one thing. At the start, we suppose that most users are not already using Eclipse.

Eclipse now allows a product to be based on a collection of "features", and includes an update manager for adding and updating features. This is a better packaging mechanism than just using plugins+dependencies. It means that users can extend their products with add-ons, as well as update the plugins from an update site.

See Eclipse help for more guidance.

RCP

The Rich Client Platform is the Eclipse architecture for building cross-platform products. Here are some pointers which were useful to understand it:

• Main page on Eclipse wiki: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Rich_Client_Platform
• Tutorial: http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-RCP-1/tutorial1.html
• multiple platforms hints in FAQ

Now that the products are set up, you don't really need to know much about this unless something goes wrong. The main challenge is installing the right combination of things for the "shadow" Eclipse installation which is used for multiple platform builds of products. There are some notes about this in the CVS file devel-docs/howto/make-release.txt in the main plugin project.