Questions / comments about the setup.eclipse profile

[Jürgen Kindler <jk...@talend.com>]

Hi,

I've tried out the setup.eclipse profile for setting up my workspace for Helios and several questions

 *   Is it by intention that the Checkstyle profile created is not activated by default ?
 *   Looks like the checkstyle setup could be simplified by styling once, then copying to the alternate directory
 *   It looks like the copyright headers are not really externalized, but rather have been copied into checkstyle / pmd / ... manually - is this intended?
 *   Looks like the PMD rules are not copied at all during setup. Again: bug or feature?
 *   Even if the pmd rules were copied, the workspace settings directory for pmd should have ".plugin" appended to its current name. Should this be solved (for backwards compatibility) in the same way as for Checkstyle ?

Phew ... That's all for now. The list got longer than I expected ...

Cheers
  Jürgen
--
Jürgen Kindler

Re: Questions / comments about the setup.eclipse profile

[Daniel Kulp <dk...@apache.org>]

On Thursday 20 January 2011 3:15:23 am Jürgen Kindler wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've tried out the setup.eclipse profile for setting up my workspace for
> Helios and several questions

A lot of the issues on this list are possibly historical.   The setup.eclipse 
stuff was setup probably 4-5 years ago, likely around Eclipse 3.1.   We had to 
work around bugs in checkstyle/pmd, bugs/limitations in the Eclipse PMD and 
Checkstyle plugins, and the maven PMD and Checkstyle plugins.   Thus, what we 
kind of ended up with was a lowest common denominator of things that we could 
get working.   :-)    A lot of the issues are likely fixed by now and could be 
revisited if someone wanted to.

> 
>  *   Is it by intention that the Checkstyle profile created is not
> activated by default ? 

This one is easy:  many of us have lots of other projects in our workspace and 
thus don't WANT the CXF checks on by default.    I use working sets 
extensively and have Camel projects in there, Swordfish, parts of ServiceMix,  
various Talend things, I import test projects all the time, etc...     (I have 
12GB ram in my machine, giving Eclipse a good chunk isn't an issue  :-)  )   
The CXF checks should not be defaulted for all the projects, just the CXF 
projects.


> *   Looks like the checkstyle setup could be
> simplified by styling once, then copying to the alternate directory 

Not sure I understand this one.

> *   It
> looks like the copyright headers are not really externalized, but rather
> have been copied into checkstyle / pmd / ... manually - is this intended?

This is definitely one of the "legacy" issues as I remember being frustrated 
about it.    If you look back through the history WAY WAY back (possibly even 
Celtix days), we did try various things in the poms and eclipse things to 
allow externalizing the header, but we couldn't get it to work due to various 
bugs in the various plugins.   The only way to get it to work was to burn it 
into the rules.     It just hasn't been a priority to revisit it.


> *   Looks like the PMD rules are not copied at all during setup. Again:
> bug or feature? 

They are copied into a .ruleset file in each project.   Again, not "global" 
scope.   The older version of the Eclipse PMD plugin (not sure about the more 
recent versions) did not have a concept of named rulesets like Checkstyle.  
You either have a single global for all projects or each project has it's own.   
Thus, it's setup to configure the projects individually with their own.   
Again, if we can avoid it, we try to avoid mucking with global settings.   
It's not always avoidable though. (or sometimes too much of a pain to avoid, 
benefit not worth the hastle.  Some of the compiler warning levels and such 
fall into that.)


> *   Even if the pmd rules were copied, the workspace
> settings directory for pmd should have ".plugin" appended to its current
> name. Should this be solved (for backwards compatibility) in the same way
> as for Checkstyle ?

I don't understand this.    For each "jar" project, we generate:

.settings/.classpath/.project - needed for eclipse
.checkstyle - checkstyle config.  Refers to the CXF Checks (or the CORBA 
version) and sets includes/excludes to only do the "src" things and not 
generated code.
.pmd - tells PMD to use a project level ruleset
.ruleset - the project level ruleset.

> 
> Phew ... That's all for now. The list got longer than I expected ...

Keep em coming.   If you want to "fix" any of the issues, patches are welcome 
as well.  :-)


-- 
Daniel Kulp
dkulp@apache.org
http://dankulp.com/blog