Want help to build openjdk 7.0 source in eclipse or netbeans

[Kelly O'Hair]

I don't build the entire jdk source from an IDE, if anyone does I'd be  
surprised and would like
to know how that went. There are multiple issues here. And I'm not  
against IDEs at all, I love them.
I'm more of a NetBeans user, so I can't say for sure that Eclipse is  
any better or worse at the issues below.

Years ago, we heard this request that we had to be able to build the  
entire jdk from NetBeans,
but the jdk is not a pure Java project and it is not a pure C/C++  
project, and NetBeans seemed to
have this concept that a project was purely Java or purely C/C++, or  
did at the time.
Well the only way we could make it work was to have NetBeans build it  
from the Makefile, and
it could take anywhere from 45min to 2hours to build the jdk, so why  
involve an IDE that will
take more memory and cpu from the machine doing the build? Just use  
the command line.
(Now if NetBeans could run locally but do the build on a really fast  
remote machine, that would be
more interesting).

So the general feeling was, build it from the command line, then use  
NetBeans to edit sources and
do incremental builds. But then we ran into the scale issues, at least  
with NetBeans, it wants to scan every
source file in the project, and that just took too long. The entire  
jdk project is just too big.
So people started creating smaller NetBeans projects, and only  
including the sources for particular areas
of interest. So if you scan the repositories for "nbproject/"  
directories you will see the existing NetBeans
projects created by various teams.

As to whether having all these nbproject directories scattered all  
over the repositories is a good idea,
well, that's a different topic. NetBeans basically works off of ant  
scripts, yours, or ones it creates, which
has it's advantages and disadvantages.

The langtools team and repository use the NetBeans project very  
successfully, but langtools is pure java,
and this project only builds langtools (javac, javah, javadoc, ...).

There may also be some Visual Studio project definitions in the  
hotspot repository which build hotspot.

Hope this helps in some way.

-kto


On Dec 18, 2010, at 11:36 PM, Ranjan Dutta wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I want to build openjdk source in netbeans or eclipse . I would  
> appreciate
> if anybody help me to build the source in nebeans or eclipse or if  
> they have
> any build doc to share.
>
> Thanks
> Ranjan