I'm in love with Tycho 0.8 and Maven 3

Monday:

Signed up for GitHub, downloaded apache-maven-3.0-alpha-7-bin.tar.gz, and built Tycho from source. Took a bit of path wrangling (namely figuring out that maven runs based on current directory), but it built and most of the tests passed. Not bad for my first day ever using Maven.

# First download Maven3 and unpack into /opt/
export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx512m"
export TYCHO_TARGET_PLATFORM=/home/nboldt/eclipse/35clean/eclipse
mvn=/opt/maven/bin/mvn
$mvn clean install -e -V -Pbootstrap-1
$mvn clean install -e -V -Pbootstrap-2 -Dtycho.targetPlatform=$TYCHO_TARGET_PLATFORM
$mvn clean test -e -V -Pits -Dtycho.targetPlatform=$TYCHO_TARGET_PLATFORM

The really confusing part was "what now? what did I just build? And how do I use it?" Answer: You can now run maven3 from .../sonatype-tycho/tycho-its/target/apache-maven-3.0-alpha-7/bin/mvn

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Tuesday:

Attended the Sonatype-sponsored Tycho Build Workshop, and amazed Pascal by saying good things about Tycho and Maven3. Apparently I'm known to complain about all things p2, despite my numerous blogs and wiki contributions touting its success and usefulness. Also installed m2eclipse to see how effective the pom editor is.

During the workshop, I got the following JBoss Tools projects to build: jmx, archives, as, flow, jbpm3/4, drools, bpel, smooks, common. That's nearly half our projects! Thanks to Jason and Igor for their invaluable assistance.

The reason it was so easy was that Max had already created a scala script to generate all the pom.xml files we need to build JBoss Tools, and a parent-pom.xml on which those tiny pom.xml files depend. (For me as a Maven noob, not having to think at all about creating poms made this transition a no-brainer. Speaking of no-brainers, my slides from Monday's talk about Dash Athena and Zombies are here (PDF).

As an added bonus, Tycho, being more strict than PDE, exposes missing information in MANIFEST.MF files such as dependencies on plugins. PDE-based builds are apparently more forgiving because they generally include more crap than is actually needed in the target platform against which the build runs; Tycho builds against what you tell it you need. So, the mavenification of JBoss Tools will actually cause us to have better described plugins, and therefore make them easier to build anywhere. I'm very impressed so far.

Unlike Dash Athena which needs to be told all the IUs (features/plugins) against which your project needs to build, Tycho determines this information from your manifests, so the information need not be duplicated.

I still need to look at how to build update sites from the output of a Tycho build, and how to hook in SWTBot/JUnit4 tests. I have a suspicion this may be handled using Buckminster tools such as their Aggregator, or my own custom Ant hackery using the SWTBot wiki docs. Time will tell.

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Wed

This morning on a whim I decided to see if I could port Max's scala script (aside: I've never seen scala before yesterday) to generate pom.xml files for EMF or GEF. Success! With some minor tweaks, I've managed to build GEF 3.6 into my local maven repo (~/.m2). Obviously there's more to be done here... but damn, this is easy.