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Building Eclipse IDE from scratch - how to choose CDT over JDT?

Lately I decided to build the Eclipse IDE from scratch - so I have the freedom to tweak it to my needs. The very first action I'm taking is enlarging the icons. Even the newest Eclipse Neon edition has still somewhat small icons on a 4k display.

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I found the following tutorial to guide me through the procedure of building Eclipse from scratch: http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/EclipsePlatformDevelopment/article.html

Especially chapter 13 of that Tutorial is helpful. I will describe the steps that need to be taken one by one here - so you don't need to read the vogella tutorial.

NEEDED SOFTWARE :

Apparently you need to have the following software installed on your (Windows) machine:

Now you're ready to start:

STEP 1 :

Create a new folder in the C:\ disk. Let's name it C:\myEclipse. This will be the folder in which we pull the Git repository of the latest Eclipse version.

STEP 2 :

Open the Windows cmd shell with administrator privileges (right click on cmd icon if you made one on your desktop, and select open with admin rights). Go to that folder through the command cd C:\myEclipse. Now type the following command: git config --system core.longpaths true. This notifies Git that long names can occur in the repository. Forget this command and it will result in errors later on.

STEP 3 :

Clone the Git repository:

git clone -b master --recursive git://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/platform/eclipse.platform.releng.aggregator.git

Apparently this git repository contains the Eclipse IDE with JDT installed. I'm not a Java developer, so I'd like other options. After lots of searching, I finally found the webpage where the choices of git repositories is listed: https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/admin/projects/?filter=platform The choices are endless:

Which one should I choose to build the barebones Eclipse platform? And which one for building the Eclipse platform with CDT installed?

STEP 4 :

Finally it is time to start the build. The build procedure will already take hours, so it is wise to skip the unit tests. Therefore do not forget to add the -DskipTests parameter. This is the command to start the build:

mvn clean verify -DskipTests

After some hours, the build should be finished.

STEP 5 :

The results of the build should now be in the following folder:

C:\myEclipse\eclipse.platform.releng.aggregator\eclipse.platform.releng.tychoeclipsebuilder\sdk\target\products

THE QUESTIONS :

  1. When you run the resulting eclipse.exe file, you'll notice that you're dealing with the Eclipse for Java Developers. That is - to my understanding - the basic Eclipse platform plus the JDT (Java Development Tools) plugin. I am not a Java Developer, and would like to build the basic Eclipse platform with the CDT plugin (C Development Tools) for pure C programming. How do I do that?

  2. Notice that the Eclipse IDE is built for all possible target machines. 32-bit Windows, 64-bit Windows, Macintosh, Linux, ... No wonder it takes hours! I would like to build for just one single target - for example my 64-bit Windows machine. This will hopefully reduce the build time significantly and allow me to verify code changes quicker. I've already posted this question here: Building Eclipse IDE from scratch - how to specify the target OS? Unfortunately, the given answers to that question did not lead to a correct result.

  3. The third issue I'm trying to fix is the icon size. Eclipse has painfully small icons. For those who are interested in making them bigger, please refer to this StackOverflow question: Building Eclipse IDE from scratch - making bigger icons sometimes successful

Thank you so much for your help.

Solution

  • For your CDT issue, I would try getting the pure UI first then add in the CDT

    As for your Maven issue, look at the maven code and see if there are options for how to build. I can't really help too much without being able to see the maven file.