Make build environment visible to IDEs working on a workspace

One thing a user might want to do with a workspace is develop on it with an IDE.

This works fine when just modifying sources as if using a normal text editor, but when we, for example, want to look up method definitions of a dependency library, we need to look inside artifacts of any dependencies of such an element.

i.e., the IDE will be looking for a directory structure sort of like:

.
├── app
│   └── src.c
└── lib
    └── lib.h

But we can currently only find src.c.

The library headers will be buried somewhere in ~/.cache/buildstream/artifacts, but an IDE would have to access this directory, which is difficult because it relies on bst internals, and might be hidden in an ostree repo. We need some way to make these artifacts accessible to the user.

A suggestion that came up was to only try and create an interface for workspaced dependencies, so that we don't need to make the whole build environment accessible, but ideally of course the whole build environment becomes accessible to an IDE.

added Needinfo label

This report is a mess, please explain what this is for properly.

closed

changed the description

changed title from Make build artifacts of workspaced dependencies visible to Make build environment visible to IDEs working on a workspace

@tlater @knownexus are you looking to re-open this issue?

@LaurenceUrhegyi Yep, I believe that is @knownexus' intention, I tried adding a bit more info to make it easier.

This was also mentioned in #209 (closed).

When I closed that issue, I first asked @tristanvb if this use case could be covered by the new format. As it turns out, bst show --workspace-dirs (I actually added that option, hehe) probably covers the use case.

An IDE should be able to read through the sources of a dependency if it is workspaced, and can figure out where to find the sources using bst show --workspace-dirs.

marked this issue as related to #209 (closed)

assigned to @toscalix

unassigned @toscalix