Monthly Archives: October 2012

Using Buckminster Plugin in Jenkins

The bugs described in this post are now fixed (since I became the new maintainer of this plugin πŸ™‚

If you use Buckminster for your builds, and have a personal Jenkins build system, you might want to rely on the Buckminster Plugin, which can be installed directly from Jenkins:

Unfortunately this plugin has some bugs (at least two) which somehow prevent you from using it, especially for new Eclipse versions. But it is quite easy to fix them once you know how; I found the solutions on the web, but I thought I could summarize them here to have them in one place.

First, if you’re not using Internet Explorer, then you’ll not be able to add build steps (which makes the plugin useless πŸ™‚

As documented in the bug report (not yet fixed): you need to edit this file (all paths are intended to be prefixed with your Jenkins path)

plugins/buckminster/WEB-INF/classes/hudson/plugins/buckminster/EclipseBuckminsterBuilder/config.jelly

and “remove the <f:section></f:section> tags which surround the <f:advanced> entries”. This is expressed by this diff with the original file

Then, with the default configuration of the plugin, you won’t be able to install a recent version of Buckminster, thus you need to provide a custom .json (to put in userContent/buckminster/buckminster.json) file to allow new versions of Buckminster to be installed (an older example is found here); this is the json file I use:

Hope this helps πŸ™‚

Back from EclipseCon Europe 2012

I’m really sad that EclipseCon Europe has already finished, it has been a wonderful edition with lots of very interesting presentations!

My favourite ones were:

And last but not least… “be nice to nerds…” πŸ™‚

Installing Eclipse Features via the command line

If you have many eclipse installations (with different features/plugins) and you want to have such installations in several computers (possibly with different operating systems or with different architectures), then being able to install eclipse features from the command line might be quite helpful (at least, it is for me πŸ™‚

You can find some related posts, like Lars Vogel’s or Paul Webster’s. These are just my two cents πŸ™‚

What you need to do is to run eclipse from the command line (if you’re using Windows, you need to run eclipsec.exe, note the final ‘c’, instead of eclipse.exe), with these parameters

Where the repo URLs are just the same as the ones you use as update sites or p2 repositories when installing a feature in Eclipse (you may want to always put the eclipse distribution main update site, e.g., http://download.eclipse.org/releases/juno), while the feature IDs are the actual identifiers of features you want to install; knowing the correct feature ID might not be immediate to discover, if you’re only used to the names you see in the update manager.

For instance, say that you want to install Xtext SDK, from the site http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/tmf/xtext/updates/composite/releases/ , then in Eclipse you would do something like in the following screenshot

but instead of “Xtext SDK“, in the command line, you should specify org.eclipse.xtext.sdk.feature.group. While in this case it was easy to infer the feature ID, but… at least for me, it was not immediate to know that “Eclipse Java EE Developer Tools” feature is indeed org.eclipse.jst.enterprise_ui.feature.feature.group !!! πŸ™‚

Fortunately, you can get to know that by clicking that “More…” link in the above screenshot, which leads you an information dialog where you can easily find the identifier of the selected feature:

Of course you can also have the list of all the contents of an update site, by using the option -list:

For instance, this is the command line I use to install in the Xtext eclipse distribution (http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/download.html) additional stuff like the Xpand SDK, some Mylyn connectors, SwtBot and EMF CDO:

The final -vmargs are just some additional arguments which you may want to skip.

Hope this helps πŸ™‚

New look!

OK, I’ve been using PmWiki for some years now for my webpage… it was time for a fresh look πŸ™‚

Let’s try WordPress then!

I’ll also take the chance to host my main programming blog on this very site.

Goodbye old home page πŸ™‚