Are Eclipse variables supported in target.platform

[SimonJohnCastle]

From the Eclipse target platform editor I can set up relative paths to plugin directories, this also appears to work when building with tycho.
When I build the target platform pom directly this work, but when I build from a parent it looks like it uses the ${project_loc} from the parent, so cannot find the plugin directory.
For the time being I can work round this by creating symbolic links in the filesystem (at least on linux).
Should this work or is it a bug ?
This becomes an issue when you checkout into a different location or user.

[laeubi]

The ${project_loc} requires the name of a project as a "basedirectory" as otherwise the current selection is used, see this comment for example.

Beside from that, Tycho supports the following eclipse variables:

• system_property
• project_loc
• env_var

[SimonJohnCastle]

Thanks for the reply, this looks to work but I dont fully understand whats going on and how it works.
For the first project, where the sub projects are all side by side including the parent and the external pluginFolder

${project_loc:/targetProjectName}/../pluginsFolder

This works in Eclipse and Maven and fits with the description as I understand it.

However I have another project where the slash after the colon has to be removed

${project_loc:targetProjectName}/../pluginsFolder

In this case the parent is directly above the sub projects.

Its not clear to me when and why to use the leading slash, but I do have a working build.
Thank you

[laeubi]

Its all a bit a matter of how you name projects and alike, e.g. tycho tries to guess what reactor project matching a given name. In general it shouldn't matter if there is a slash or not (at least for tycho), you just need to make sure that there are no additional segments inside the brackets as this is not supported by tycho itself.

If you could provide a sample projects where it fails, it might be easier to guess why.

[ffays]

Neither system_property nor env_var variables are currently working in target platform definition on Mac OS:

org.apache.maven.InternalErrorException: Internal error: java.lang.RuntimeException: Invalid syntax in target definition ...
...
Caused by: org.eclipse.tycho.p2.target.facade.TargetDefinitionSyntaxException: invalid URI
...
Caused by: java.net.URISyntaxException: Illegal character in authority at index 7: file://${env_var:HOME}/git/myproject
...

org.apache.maven.InternalErrorException: Internal error: java.lang.RuntimeException: Invalid syntax in target definition ...
...
Caused by: org.eclipse.tycho.p2.target.facade.TargetDefinitionSyntaxException: invalid URI
...
Caused by: java.net.URISyntaxException: Illegal character in authority at index 7: file://${system_property:user.home}/git/myproject
...

[laeubi]

Please share a full project / target file or provide an integration-test to demonstrate the issue.

[ffays]

Hereby a full project that demonstrate the issue: tycho.issue550.zip

Deploy the project in your ${HOME}/git (unix) or %USERPROFILE%\git (windows)

Build: cd ~/git/tycho.issue550 && mvn clean && mvn -f tycho.issue550.update/pom.xml package && mvn package (unix)

Note the update site has to be build prior to build whole project as there is a dependency in target platform referring to a local plugin from the update site.

Could you please have a look?

[laeubi]

You are using variable in the location attribute of an updatesite what is not supported by PDE (and therefore not by Tycho) see:

• [target] Support user variables inside targets eclipse-pde/eclipse.pde#204

If you don't care about IDE support, you can either define your repo in the pom.xml repository section or using mirrors in settings.xml, in both cases you can use whatever maven support at these places.