Question

I’m trying to build eclipse from scratch. I could download eclipse e4 from CVS, which has 426 projects. After the automatic build, I got tens of broken project build. I tried to fix some of them, but most of them are still broken including swt and jface.

Googling about eclipse architecture, I found that Wikipedia points out that
With the exception of a small run-time kernel, everything in Eclipse is a plug-in.

What projects in CVS are the run-time kernel? How many projects do I need to build successfully to get vanilla eclipse that is not a plugin but core eclipse? I mean what is the project that after the build I can execute eclipse.exe even though it has no plugin?

Any hints for building them would also be great.

Answer 1

I asked the same question to eclipse forum to get some answers.

In short, this is the idea.

1. You need a launcher which is platform dependent:
   • http://eclipse.org/equinox/framework/
   • http://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_How_do_I_run_Eclipse%3F
2. Then, you need OSGi/Equinox to be compiled
   • http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/documents/quickstart-framework.php

Once you have the launcher and OSGi, everything is a module on top of it.