Customizing the build
Not always we want the build to happen according to the out-of-the-box scripts.In fact, customizations are almost always needed - be it fetching the sources or the way we wish to assemble them. PDE Build provides a set of templates which can be used to hook in the customize (add to and/or override) the default behavior.
These templates are available in PDE Build plug-in (inside templates\headless-build folder of org.eclipse.pde.build_<version><qualifier>). The scripts and templates are one the main reason why PDE Build plug-in is a directory and not a jar.
The purpose and usage of these templates have been explained nicely in Eclipse help under the topic Customizing a Headless Build.
These templates are
- customTargets,xml
- allElements.xml
- customAssembly.xml
In short, the customTargets.xml have various pre- and post- ant targets that build.xml (or productBuild.xml - in case you are building a product) calls before and after each process (like setup, source fetch, build, assemble, package, etc). Similarly, the targets in allElements.xml and customAssembly.xml gets delegated for various jobs.
To use these templates we need to copy them in the build configuration directory (c:\build\buildConfiguration in our example) where we stored build.properties file in previous steps. And then modify the appropriate targets. This is what we will do for building an update site in next step.
