Monthly Archives: December 2012

Regular Expression Replacement in an Ant Property

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I’m quite a newbie in Ant, but I thought it would be straightforward to do a regular expression replacement in a string contained in a property; in my case, I had to replace Windows backslashes with Unix slashes… apparently, unless you use the propertyregex task from Ant Contrib, that is not supported out-of-the-box: you have to pass through a file!

This stackoverflow post shows a possible solution, and starting from that, I created a macrodef to make it easier

This macro takes the property value to process (property.to.process) and the property name where to store the result; it outputs the input value to a temporary file, reads it back with a regular expression replacement (which is supported for files) and store it in the specified property (the temporary file is then deleted).

Here’s an example of use

 

Mirror Eclipse repositories from Eclipse

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In a previous post, I blogged about mirroring Eclipse repositories with the p2.mirror Ant task; Since this Ant task needs to be run via the Eclipse antRunner application, you need a full installation of Eclipse on the machine that will run the task and I showed how to run this task from the command line.

It might be more comfortable sometimes to run it from Eclipse; for this, you need to create a launch configuration which runs an Eclipse Application, the same you run from the command line: org.eclipse.ant.core.antRunner.

We create a new general project (say, my.eclipse.mirror) and we create a mirror.ant file with the following example content (see the previous post for more details):

mirror-repos 2012-12-22 13:48:46

This example will mirror

  • org.eclipse.rcp.sdk, the eclipse launcher and the feature for adding update site features to your RCP, from the main Juno release site,
  • the whole Orbit repository (that version of the repository)
  • the whole Buckminster headless repository

Now we select the “Run Configurations…” dialog

mirror-repos 2012-12-22 13:49:02

and we create a new Eclipse Application launch configuration, which we call run_mirror; we choose, as the Program to Run, the application org.eclipse.ant.core.antRunner. Note that this application is installed by default in your SDK, but if there is a different target platform active in your workspace, which does not include the org.apache.ant bundle, this launch will fail.

mirror-repos 2012-12-22 13:49:45

In the Arguments tab, we must specify the -buildfile argument (expected by the runner) passing our ant file mirror.ant; this file is intended to be relative to the Working directory, thus we must modify it by selecting our project relative to the workspace:

mirror-repos 2012-12-22 13:50:35

Optionally, we save this launch configuration, using the “Common” tab, into our project

mirror-repos 2012-12-22 13:51:00

By default, the mirror will be saved into the folder eclipsemirror into your home folder; you may want to change this by specifying the additional program argument -Dtarget.dir=<path>, for instance,

mirror-repos 2012-12-22 13:51:27

Choose Apply and then Run; in your console view you should see that the mirror task has started

 

You can ignore possible problems of dependencies which cannot be satisfied

 

Depending on your Network connection it might take some time, but in the end you should see something like

mirror-repos 2012-12-22 15:39:46

And you can see that the mirror directory will mimic the original repositories structure

mirror-repos 2012-12-22 16:54:33

This example project can be found at https://github.com/LorenzoBettini/eclipse-mirror-example

Happy mirroring! 🙂

 

One Eclipse Installation and Multiple Configurations

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I used to have many Eclipse installations in my machines; typically they were different Juno versions downloaded from ecipse.org, for instance, Eclipse for RCP developers, Eclipse for DSL developers, Eclipse Modeling Tools, etc. Moreover, most of them were customized with the same plugins (for instance, Mylyn connectors) which I had to install on all of them. I preferred to have separate installations not to have a monolithic single Eclipse instance (where some features might also interfere with each other).

Then I started to use the ability of Eclipse to deal with multiple configurations, which is really a cool feature.

The idea is that you have a single Eclipse installation with all the features you always used and that you would desire in all of your Eclipse installations; then you have different directories for each “configuration”.

You can start Eclipse with a command line like the following, which uses the command line argument -configuration:

Assuming that the main Eclipse installation is in eclipse-main directory, and that the new separate configuration will be stored in eclipse-other/configuration (which will be automatically created if it does not yet exist). What you get is a running Eclipse instance with all the features and plugins of the main Eclipse installation, but all the new features which will be installed from this running instance will go in the new configuration, thus they won’t disturb the main installation!

If you try to install new software from this Eclipse running instance, you’ll see that the list of available software sites is empty, so you will have to fill such list with the typical Eclipse software sites, such as http://download.eclipse.org/releases/juno and http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/4.2.

And then you can install new features in this Eclipse, and they will be available only in this configuration. You can then check the plugins and features directories in eclipse-other which will contain the new installed features and bundles (which will not be stored in the same directories of eclipse-main); similarly, the plugins and features directories in eclipse-other will not contain the features and bundles which are stored in the same directories of eclipse-main, though they are available in the new Eclipse configuration.

Of course, you’ll have to use the above command line each time you want this Eclipse version (you should have shell scripts to run a specific Eclipse).

Main advantages in this approach are

  1. The features you want to use in all configurations are stored in only one place, and they will be maintained only in the eclipse-main installation (e.g., kept up to date)
  2. you save some space in your hard disk (I had 4 Eclipse installations which required 2.5 Gb; with the new approach, i.e., one Eclipse main installation and 3 configurations I only need 500 Mb!)

If you can still use command line to install new features in the separate configurations (I blogged about that); you just need to adjust the command line with the -configuration parameter.

For instance, to have an Eclipse configuration in eclipse-texlipse/configuration (based on the main Eclipse installation stored in eclipse-main) with the addition of Texlipse and Subversion features I run these commands

Note that using the command line for installing new features will also store in the Eclipse configuration the specified update sites (so you will find them in the Install New Software dialog).