Project Build Inquiries

[AMendenhall]

Hi whoever is still active.

Recently I've been digging around the nitty gritty files of FRC projects, so here's some questions I have after doing some exploring (concerning mainly build.xml) WARNING: it gets rambly.

${user.home}/wpilib/wpilib.properties

I'm assuming the ${} syntax is standard for xml. A quick search says that it's a substitution variable. What other interesting things can you do with that besides go to the current user's folder? On which OSs?

Inside wpilib.properties, there's this line:

#Don't add new properties, they will be deleted by the eclipse plugin.
version=current
team-number=3925

What language is that? What other things can you do with the .properties filetype? It says you shouldn't edit it. What code is automatically changing it? Could you set up a thing in eclipse or other to automatically ask what team number you want to configure it to instead of having to go to Window->Preferences? Like the run recent button? I mean, robotBuilder has the crane, so why not a team number chooser? Also, how does robotBuilder do that? And FX?

In build.properties

robot.class=${package}.Robot
userLibs=${user.home}/navx-mxp/java/lib/navx_frc.jar

That's to include the NavX libraries. Why don't you need to do that for WPILib.jar or NetworkTables.jar? Also, there's the ${} notation.

Back in build.xml

<property file="${user.home}/wpilib/java/${version}/ant/build.properties"/>

More ${}. What is ant? There's ant-classloadertask, ant-contrib. What do those do?

In ...ant/build.properties

username=lvuser
password=
deploy.dir=/home/lvuser
deploy.kill.command=. /etc/profile.d/natinst-path.sh; /usr/local/frc/bin/frcKillRobot.sh -t -r
debug.flag.dir=/tmp/
debug.flag.command=chown lvuser:ni ${debug.flag.dir}frcdebug
command.dir=/home/lvuser/
version=current
roboRIOJRE.dir=/usr/local/frc/JRE

Could you boot code to the other account on the RIO? It's got username and password. Is deploy.dir (/home/lvuser) a location on the RIO? It seems like it. What's the deploy.kill.command? Are the -t -r command line arguments? I'd assume the /usr/local/frc/bin/frcKillRobot.sh is also on the RIO. Given debug.flag.dir=/tmp/, could you SSH the RIO to look at that and is it a debug log? Questions for every line in that file.

Anyway, if anyone can answer any of those questions, I'd appreciate it. If you have any other questions about the nitty gritty of FRC Java projects, here's the thread to post 'em. Thanks!