Hello Andre and Jürgen,
I have recently started working with OpenOffice, and wanted to get into
deeper details of the massive codebase.
Although I am used to working with vim+gnuToochain, but given the codebase
size, an IDE for indexing and viewing the code seems to be a good way
forward for someone new to this codebase. Eclipse as specified here seems
to be quite good for debugging and viewing code.
Is there some standard IDE that is used for debugging/editing core OO code
in SC/SD/WriterFilter etc?
Thanks,
Abhishek
On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 3:04 PM, Jürgen Schmidt jogischm...@gmail.comwrote:
On 12/17/13 9:58 AM, Andre Fischer wrote:
Hi,
About a week or so ago I tried again to import the OpenOffice source
code into Eclipse. The last time I tried that, a few years ago, this
did not work at all. Our source code was just to big and too complex.
This time however, it worked out of the box. If you do it right :-)
The developers of the CDT (the C/C++ Development Tooling) have made
great progress in the last years.
As this allows newcomers a much easier way to become OpenOffice
developers and also can make the work of experienced developers more
productive I would like to share how to set up Eclipse for OpenOffice.
This process is still a bit rough around the edges. Any help is
appreciated.
I have started a Wiki page [1] which explains the manual setup. It
should work on all platforms but at the moment only Windows is
described. Maybe you can help to fill in missing values for other
platforms. I am working on a few Eclipse plugins to automate this
process:
- A wizard for setting up an Eclipse workspace. The prototype has just
to be pointed to the (compiled) source code. It will then collect all
the necessary include paths and set the necessary compiler defines so
that the indexer can resolve even the platform dependent definitions.
This is important because even something as simple as sal_Int16 will not
be recognized without the indexer being told about platform specific
preprocessor defines.
- The idea of CDT about how C/C++ files are built is different from how
OpenOffice does it. Therefore I am developing a short term solution
that provides a couple of buttons/menu entries/whatever will be
appropriate to build the current module, directory or file and then
deploy the new libraries into an installed office.
Here are some highlight of what Eclipse and CDT allow us to do:
- Easily switch between header and implementation file.
- Follow header inclusion (just Ctrl-click on an #include statement and
the referenced header file is opened in the editor.
- Get information about variables and classes by simply hovering over
their names. A popup box shows you the variable definition or the class
implementation. That is something you have to see to believe it.
- Find out from where a function or method is called
- Explore the type hierarchy of a class.
- Macro expansion. Hover over a macro use and see the expansion of it,
several iterations if necessary. Ever wanted to know how IMPL_LINK is
defined? Just move your mouse pointer over it.
- Code assist while typing. Define a variable, eg.
::rtl::OUString sText
Then type sText., wait a little (default is 500ms) and a box shows
you all the available methods of OUString.
- An overview at the right side shows you all the functions, methods,
includes, macro defines etc, that are made in the currently edited
file. Click on one and jump to the corresponding source code.
All of this may sound familiar to Java developers. But for C++,
especially for OpenOffice, I think this is quite remarkable.
And to underline what Andre has described above, this is really cool and
we are sure it will help us a lot.
I watched a video from Bjoern Michaelsen from LO where he presented
something similar for KDevelop and pointed out what's possible with
their new complete gbuild system I didn't understand the relation
between the build system and the integration and talked with Andre about
and others about it.
Andre who is quite familiar with Eclipse (I am more a NetBeans guy)
spend a first hour on experimenting with Eclipse. We didn't knew that
and after an hour he presented us the first results which were impressive.
I did a similar test on my Mac with the same result and was able to
compile and debug (old gcc env) in Eclipse. Well I had some problems
with the new upcoming env (clang, lldb) because there is no lldb tool
chain for Eclipse yet. But anyway the whole support and the advantage of
the indexer and the related navigation in the source code is so huge
that we will definitely continue and follow up on this.
And as Andre pointed out this is and can be fun and even the results
after a few hours were impressive.
If there are volunteers who have experience in plugin development for
Eclipse please join and
