Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Ubuntu and Eclipse and svn

In the last two months, I have been spending some time developing phone applications in JAVA and using Eclipse as the IDE. Not having ever written in JAVA before, I cannot even imagine how long the whole development process would have taken was it not for the IDE.

So far in my development life, all my C/C++ code writing has required:
- a Linux system (i.e 'grep')
- ssh access to the build server (with right kernel, glibc, gcc version)
- vim + ctags for source code
- valgrind for finding memory leaks
- gdb for deugging

So the whole Eclipse+JAVA experience got me thinking if I could get any benefit from using a Eclipse for a large C++ project that I am involved with at work. Maybe it will at least help prevent carpal-tunnel from having to grep the life out of the project.

It seems the default Eclipse install for Ubuntu 8.04 is version 3.2 which is fairly old. So, it is best to download the newest version rather than use apt-get.

Next challenge was to get Subversion plugin.

Apparently, trying to add the svn plugin kept giving me an error
"
An error occured during provisioning.
Cannot connect to keystore.
JKS
"

Fortunately, some google searching pointed me to the fix. The plugin install needs Java 1.6 or newer. Also, the Java 1.6 has to be the default JRE which most likely it wont' be even after doing:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jdk

The Ubuntu Java Installation documentation explains how to select the default Java version on your system.

You could use
update-java-alternatives -l
or
manually pick the java-6-sun using sudo update-alternatives --config java

Oh well, I now finally have the C++ project under Eclipse pulled in from svn, I can at least browse the code.

Also, if anybody is looking for suggestions on what other developers perfer when doing C++ coding, check out this stackoverflow link.

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