xPacks installing Eclipse?

[trampas]

I it possible to have xPacks install eclipse or VSCode? How about Segger JLink tools?

Thanks

[ilg-ul]

I it possible to have xPacks install eclipse or VSCode?

The main purpose of the xPack project was to automate CI builds and tests. Eclipse and VSCode do not fit very well into this category.

How about Segger JLink tools?

That would require a lot of maintenance efforts, since there are a lot of releases. Plus that the binaries might not be standalone and relocatable, as all other xPack binaries.

But if you need the J-Link tools as an xpm dependency (or any other tools), you can create your own GitHub project and refer to the Segger URLs in package.json. You don't have to publish your package on npmjs.com, xpm can install it from GitHub.

[trampas]

Thanks!

For myself doing CI builds I just use Docker, which is very easy and repeatable. I have one code base, and one target processor, so the CI process is very easy and simple without xPacks. As such xPacks has little value in the CI process for me personally.

The harder thing I find is dealing with multiple developers and making it where they can develop code and have repeatable build environment for each developer on windows with an IDE. Talking with other embedded developers it appears that many of them ship a virtual box image of windows OS with all the development tools installed and working with their projects to get around this problem. They then run into problems of how to store the virtual box image and maintain it, however to date none of them have a better solution.
Others just buy Segger Embedded Studio for each developer, sure it is worse than other IDEs but it solves the repeatable build environment problem and if the engineers are so dumb they can not setup build environment the cost of Segger Embedded Studio is not the biggest problem.

I am going to recommend moving to Segger Embedded Studio for our needs. It might be expensive, but it solves the problem of repeatable build environment on windows with an IDE.

Thanks
Trampas

[ilg-ul]

CI builds I just use Docker, which is very easy and repeatable. I have one code base, and one target processor, so the CI process is very easy and simple

Well, sure, for simple projects you can use Docker, but this means you run the builds/tests in a Linux environment only.

First, my portable builds and tests are expected to run on: Windows, macOS Intel & Arm, Linux Intel & Arm; second, the tests are executed natively on the host platform with GCC 11, 12, 13, with clang 13, 14, 15, 16 and on bare metal on Cortex-M0+, M3, M4, M7, Cortex-A15, Cortex-A72, RISC-V 32, RISC-V 64 (for example this project).

You can't do this with Docker, simply because Docker means Linux, there are no macOS or Windows images. Not to mention that you would need lots of images, with all those compilers.

I am going to recommend moving to Segger Embedded Studio for our needs

Good luck with your projects!