Using Alcatel-Lucent nmake with Eclipse TM

Remote command shell

The RSE remote command shell is a line oriented command processor that sends commands to a remote shell and interprets and displays the results. It parses command output to provide features such as clickable filenames and navigation to compilation errors in source files.

The remote command shell works well with nmake with a slight tweak. Out of the box, the command output parser is sensitive to the make command but not to the nmake command. Defining a shell alias works around this issue: alias make=nmake. Then entering the command make runs nmake builds with proper output interpretation. The following example shows a ssh connection to a remote Solaris 10 host:

The input command was make -k, showing multiple error outputs. The remote shell view is on the lower right with tab labeled "Europa_ssh". The remote file hierarchy is shown in the Remote Systems tree display on the upper left, and the source file positioned at the error location is shown in the editor labeled a.c.

Note that:

• RSE correctly flagged informational lines (colored blue and labeled with an i icon) and errors (colored red and labeled with a x icon).
• Clicking on an error in the remote shell output display loads the associated file into an editor positioned at the error.
• Since the file containing the error is a C file, it is automatically displayed using the Eclipse CDT C editor using features of that editor such as syntax coloring. The CDT plugin must be installed in this Eclipse instance to pick up the CDT C editor.
• Since there is no CDT project context for this file, the Outline view is empty.
• RSE does not interpret nmake messages indicating recursion to another directory, even when nmake is configured to output GNU make style directory recursion messages (not shown in example screen dump). Consequently RSE is not able to navigate to source files originating from recursive makes that recurse to other directories.

Notes

• This test was performed using Eclipse 3.3M7-linux-gtk, RSE 2.0M6a, CDT 4.0.0 M7 and a prerelease version of nmake alu3.9. The connection was to a remote Solaris 10 host over ssh. Although not tested, we expect that the test scenario would also work using Windows based Eclipse.

Issues

• The RSE EFS support worked to a limited extent for Eclipse CDT projects. Using the RSE EFS integration, we were able to create a remote ssh connection and link in a remote project directory to an existing local CDT project. We were then able to edit remote C files with full CDT C editor features including a functional outline view. But attempts to edit Makefiles failed with a NullPointerException. Attempts to define project build settings using the remote directory as top level build location also failed with NullPointerExceptions. We surmise that CDT is not yet fully EFS aware and is attempting to access remote files using local filesystem operations. Since EFS support is a stated CDT project goal, we expect this situation to improve over time.
• Configuring the remote shell to recognize nmake is preferred to the alias approach taken here. However, we were not able to locate the appropriate compile command configuration options in the tested version of RSE.