Question

I got the source for Eclipse upstream plugins (that is, provided by the Eclipse Foundation) from the CVS and imported one of them to Eclipse PDE (in this case, org.eclipse.core.runtime). That did succeed, since the sources have the necessary metadata for PDE. I placed a few breakpoints and tried to launch it from the IDE with debugging, supposing that this would launch a new copy of an IDE so that the newly-built plugin would replace whatever would otherwise be loaded. This way I could debug Eclipse internals. However, it did not turn out this way. Building the plugin actually failed with literally thousands of errors.
So, should Eclipse source be buildable in this way? If there is a better way to do this, I am open to ideas.

Answer 1

You are right, it is expected that you checkout the plugin and be able to start hacking on it immediately and launch the new version… with one requirement: your target platform must match the the plugin’s version. So, if you checked out the latest version, you need to have very recent nightly or integration build set up as Target Platform. If the plugin is from an older version (say 3.6 or 3.5), you’ll need to set up the respective version.

The easiest way to setup your target platform is to download the corresponding build, extract it somewhere and then add the installation in the target platform (Window -> Preferences -> Plug-in Development -> Target Platform). Hint: add it as Installation location.