Bug 159142

Summary:	RFE: Add support for the GNU Autotools to Eclipse
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Dave Malcolm <dmalcolm>
Component:	eclipse-cdt	Assignee:	Jeff Johnston <jjohnstn>
Status:	CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	rawhide	CC:	eclipse-bugs, kms, mlists
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	FutureFeature
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:	eclipse-cdt-3.1.1-3	Doc Type:	Enhancement
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2006-10-26 18:31:45 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Dave Malcolm 2005-05-30 16:19:42 UTC

A sizable percentage of Open Source projects are built using automake, autoconf
and libtool.

I would Eclipse to support a kind of project defined purely in terms of the
autotools source files: configure.in/ac and the various Makefile.am files

This would allow Eclipse to be used as a drop-in IDE for all of these projects,
and make Eclipse much more viable to these OSS developers. 

Code exists in the gnome-build project in GNOME CVS for working with autotool
source files; IIRC it can parse them, write them out, and has an MVC framework
with signal emissions when changes are made.  This is used by the Anjuta IDE. 
It is not 100% perfect, but it appears to be good enough for most purposes.

IMHO, very few developers understand these autotools; they work by copying and
pasting fragments of configure.in and Makefile.am files between projects.  Only
in a few cases does the precise syntax matter - provided that it's preserved
(which I believe the gnome-build stuff does)

Comment 1 Andrew Overholt 2005-09-19 18:51:06 UTC

Dave already knows this, but some work was done for this as part of Google's
Summer of Code under the KDE umbrella:

http://kde-eclipse.pwsp.net

Comment 2 Andrew Overholt 2006-01-17 16:46:17 UTC

FWIW, I've started to take a look at the KDE project.  If anyone else wants to
join in on the hacking, that'd be awesome!

Comment 3 Dave Malcolm 2006-01-17 18:29:58 UTC

I'm not familiar enough with java packaging to do this, but it would be nice to
have them in Extras (or even Core!).

But the package should really be called something like eclipse-autotools or
similar; the kde in the name is misleading.

Comment 4 Andrew Overholt 2006-01-17 18:33:44 UTC

(In reply to comment #3)
> I'm not familiar enough with java packaging to do this, but it would be nice to
> have them in Extras (or even Core!).

Yeah, I'd like to add them as a dependency of eclipse-cdt (just at the RPM level).

> But the package should really be called something like eclipse-autotools or
> similar; the kde in the name is misleading.

Alexander said he'd change the package name after SoC was over so I should speak
to him.  I also have a small patch to send him.

Comment 5 Ben Konrath 2006-09-04 20:27:17 UTC

Reassigning to Jeff Johnston becuase he is working on adding GNU Autotools
support to the CDT.

Comment 6 Jeff Johnston 2006-10-26 18:31:45 UTC

A separate project called the Autotools project is actively underway.  The
Autotools plug-in is currently shipped with the FC6 eclipse-cdt package.  See:
http:/sources.redhat.com/eclipse/autotools for details on how to access the source.