Bug 336144

Description Mirko Raner 2011-02-02 15:20:06 EST

At my company, we're working a lot with MWE2 workflows, and a lot of developers are confused by the fact that MWE2 workflows are regular launch configurations and not external tool builders. Besides being off conceptually, this also causes some practical problems for our work.

The "external" designation for External Tool configurations might be a slight misnomer, but generally this category of launch configurations is intended for running tools that are part of the development process, including Ant, executables, and several other build and scripting tools that fall into this category. The regular launch configurations are normally used for running the "fruits of your labor", so to speak, i.e. this category is for launching the plug-in, Java application, servlet, or other artifact that you have been building (as opposed to launching a tool that is involved in building that artifact). Conceptually, MWE2 launches seem to belong into the External Tools category, because they implement build steps that are necessary for creating the plug-in, Java application, etc. In other works, MWE2 workflows are not primary artifacts like a plug-in or a servlet, but more like a build.xml or a Makefile.

The practical difficulty with MWE2 launches not being classified as External Tools is that you cannot easily add them as a builder on a project. We have a lot of pretty complicated project set-ups that involve multiple levels of generated code, and it's easy to forget to run the workflow, so we generally configure our projects with an automated MWE2 builder. To do this, we usually create a dummy Ant builder, which will create a corresponding .launch file under .externalToolBuilders, then configure the MWE2 workflow to use a shared .launch file (Common -> Shared file:) and copy the contents of that file into the .launch file in .externalToolBuilders. This will result effectively in an MWE2 builder to be added to the project, but it's obviously a very cumbersome (and also error prone) way to get there. It would be much easier to simply click New... on the builders configuration page and find MWE2 workflows listed together with Ant and other build tools.

Would it be possible to move MWE2 workflows into the External Tools category? I know it's a trivial change, but I'm not sure what other facts need to be taken into consideration here.