Downloading Eclipse's Source Code [closed]

Question

I'm doing a study on large Java projects and would like to view the source code for Eclipse. I have gone to this url (http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/CVS_Howto) and figured that the most useful cvs repository for me to look at would be this one:

:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/eclipse (The Eclipse platform project)

However, when looking at this repository, it has so many modules! Which modules should I be trying to check out? I don't necessarily want to build the IDE from source, however, I just want to get the core Eclipse code base to perform some analysis. Would I just check out any modules starting with "org.eclipse..."? Should I be checking out any of the others?

Or is there an easier way to get the source? I read somewhere that you can get the source from the binary version of Eclipse but I am unsure where to find the source.

Answer 1

Just download the source tarball eclipse-cvs.tgz from here

EDIT: This also includes version history, so it may be larger than you need. For just a current version download Platform-SDK.3.5.2 ~ 100MB

It includes the sources in jar files e.g.

org.eclipse.ui.workbench_3.5.2.M20100113-0800.jar
org.eclipse.ui.workbench.source_3.5.2.M20100113-0800.jar

Answer 2

For empirical studies, a good resource to check out is the Qualitas Corpus. It's a collection of open-source Java programs for use in empirical studies. In addition to having source code for a larger number of major projects (including Eclipse) they have multiple versions of each program, so you can track how code changes over time, if that's important. It's a respected corpus in the Software Engineering/Programming Languages research community, and so it may make your work more suitable for comparison in the future.

I'm not a part of their project, but I have used their corpus in a recent study. If you shoot them an email and tell them what your project is about, they'll give you http download access.

Answer 3

I can only answer this bit:

Or is there an easier way to get the source? I read somewhere that you can get the source from the binary version of Eclipse but I am unsure where to find the source.

In eclipse/plugins/, the jars named *.source_*.jar contain source. For example, in my install:

org.eclipse.osgi_3.4.0.v20080605-1900.jar
org.eclipse.osgi.source_3.4.0.v20080605-1900.jar

The first jar contains the OSGi runtime, and the latter contains the corresponding source.