Much ado about scripting, Linux & Eclipse: card subject to change

2009-04-01

Dash Athena: Epic Fail

Damn airport scanners.

On Sunday while I was flying home from EclipseCon, I decided to try out Git, and migrated the whole Dash CVS tree into a local Git repo. Then, I deleted the CVS stuff in dev.eclipse.org because Git is so much better and DVCS is the Way of the Future.

Unfortunately, somewhere between Calgary and Toronto, my hard drive died, taking with it the whole repo.

Since we now have to start over completely from scratch, Andrew and I have decided to take this opportunity to re-architect a few things:

  1. Instead of Ant scripts which wrap & simplify PDE, we're going to use perl scripts which wrap ant4eclipse. No one really cares about OSGi anymore anyway.

  2. Instead of being able to run a build in Eclipse, we're going to support running on MIDP devices only (smartphones) and older hardware (bug 260000). This will make builds much smaller and more portable for everyone.

  3. We're dropping the built-in support for running JUnit tests as part of an automated build, because the Agile way is to do Build Breakage Driven Development (BBDD) rather than TDD.

  4. Because the Hudson instance on build.eclipse.org is only accessible to an elite few (bug 270633), we're dropping that too, in favour of Cruise Control, much lauded by the WTP and Orbit dev teams for its friendly user interface and many extensible configuration options.

Should you have any concerns with this new plan, don't hesitate to post your comments here. We value the community's input, and will take your thoughts under advisement. Then ignore them and do what we want.

3 comments:

oisin said...

LOL. Except it got a little bit too real there at the end ;)

John Graham said...

Have you noticed that the same thing happened to the JBT/JBDS build today? Coincidence? I think not!

Unknown said...

The story really reminds me of something I heard of about a tool once known by the name JBuilder. But that's probably all rumors...