The CBI initiative is working at providing some infrastructure and templates to make it easy to get a new eclipse project up and running. So with a little setup, a new project can take advantage of some of the technologies (maven/tycho) and services (hudson.eclipse.org, eclipse jar signing) that the Eclipse Foundation offers.
One of CBI's trial projects is the Eclipse Project build (now called Eclipse Classic SDK :-) It's like the poster child for build edge conditions.
Right now the Eclipse project is built with a rather large set of PDE build scripts. But as we recently went through a lot of work trying to get them to build on eclipse.org, I can attest to the fact that they're not terribly portable.
With the need for various organizations to be able to build eclipse in their own environments, the CBI initiative is taking advantage of the fact that the second person to build something with maven gets a (mostly :-) free ride.
After cloning a large git repo made up mostly of submodules, all you have to do is install 2 poms and you're off to the races:
bash$ git clone -b Juno_RC4_R4 --recursive \ ssh://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/cbi/platform-aggregator.git \ R4_platform-aggregator bash$ cd R4_platform-aggregator bash$ mvn -f eclipse-parent/pom.xml \ clean install \ -Dmaven.repo.local=/opt/pwebster/lts/R4_localrepo bash$ mvn -f maven-cbi-plugin/pom.xml \ clean install \ -Dmaven.repo.local=/opt/pwebster/lts/R4_localrepo bash$ mvn \ clean install \ -Dmaven.test.skip=true \ -Dmaven.repo.local=/opt/pwebster/lts/R4_localrepo
Once finished, your build repo is in R4_platform-aggregator/TMP/org.eclipse.sdk.epp/target/repository and some Eclipse SDK zips are in R4_platform-aggregator/TMP/org.eclipse.sdk.epp/target/products. These locations might move when we migrate some releng information over to eclipse.platform.releng.eclipsebuilder.
This is still a work in progress, so the build doesn't produce all of the build output of our tradition PDE-driven build. Work is still being done to get the compile levels correct, and figure out a replacement or callout to the customCallBacks.xml.
There are also some other hiccups, like having to run the build twice as the first time it fails with a compile error in org.eclipse.jface. But in short order you have yourself a product build.
For more information see the CBI wiki.
