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