Massive Eclipse Project Generation Issues

[StephanOpfer]

Hi all,

I tried to regenerate the Eclipse projects with catkin-tools, as mentioned in issue #49.

"catkin_make" generated only one big eclipse project for the whole workspace.

"catkin build" generates one project for each package. Handling each package separately is one of "catkin build"'s advantages, but eclipse is not able to handle a lot of packages (55 in my case) in one workspace.

Typically, when I say "rebuild index" in eclipse, it throws some error:

Error: GC overhead limit exceeded.

Does someone has the same experience and maybe a good solution for that?

Kind regards,
Stephan

[adolfo-rt]

I don't expect you to be developing simultaneously on all 55 packages, so one alternative is to leverage workspace chaining. You can then have a workspace A consisting of the more stable packages you build from source (hopefully most), but touch infrequently, and another one B that extends A, with the (hopefully few) packages you're actually hacking on. Apart from making your Eclipse setup more tractable, your build times should improve slightly, as the stable packages need not be crawled when catkin building workspace B.

[jbohren]

@StephanOpfer You could also try some of the suggestions here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6310928/how-do-you-organize-100-projects-in-eclipse

[StephanOpfer]

Thank you for listing options I haven't thought of, yet.

An aspect, I didn't mentioned yet, is that the projects are coded with the c++11 standard. That means, that it is necessary to configure the generated eclipse-projects according to these steps: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17457069/enabling-c11-in-eclipse-juno-kepler-luna-cdt

Doing this for several eclipse workspaces or projects feels like a lot of unnecessary work. In my opinion it would be the best to give the eclipse project generators some parameter to make them generating c++11 standard conform projects. I guess, that the catkin-tools issue page is the wrong address for that, but maybe there are options I am not aware of.

[jbohren]

@StephanOpfer take a look at this: http://marian.schedenig.name/2013/11/21/eclipse-cmake-and-c11/

You should be able to use the following when generating your eclipse projects:

catkin config -a --cmake-args -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER_ARG1=-std=c++11

[jbohren]

Or even just add that to each package in your workspace that actually uses c++11.