White Paper Discuss: Eclipse for Robotics

[MikeN]

Hello all

I have been using MPLAB for a while, and was already using eclipse, so the chance to junk MPLAB was eagerly taken!

I have Windows XP, with eclipse 3.1.1 with CDT_SDK 3.0.1. I installed minGW (via the MSYS install), set up my paths and off we went.

I have had a number of problems, some soleved, some went away, one remaining, as below

1. Flags for error level is incorrect -nw=x - should be -w=x. Sorted by editing the .xml file (after unzipping from .jar file)
2. I wanted to specify the large memory model, so again modified the xml.
3. The del /f command doesn't work - it is built in in win32 not a stand alone command. The cleanCommand doesn't seem to be acted upon, so (temporarily) I copied minGW rm.exe to del.exe and that works. Makes no difference, as eclipse clears the build directory prior to doing a make clean (via project/clean), but it works.
4. The minGW make seems to do something odd - the linker tries to read the a:/ drive and can't, giving an error. Again temporarily I tried a make from gnuWIN, and that seems to do what is expected.
5. The default library FRC_Library.lib which I don't use would not go away when deleted from the project properties so I removed that from the xml file as well. Also the unneeded -D_FRC_BOARD flag for the compiler.

I had some problems which have gone away - principally the linker looking in the wrong place for the object files. The compiler was putting them in the build directory, the linker looked in the source directory. This has gone away - I didn't do anything obvious.

6. Finally the one thats left (may be a feature!). There is no dependency checking done. If I modify a header file, the relevant object are not rebuild. Is this expected?

I will post my modified xml file if its of interest, when I have had a bit longer to go over it.

I welcome any comments on any aspect of the above

Regards Mike Newsome