What is a "build manager" for scala in the scala ide extensions for Eclipse?

Question

In Eclipse in Preferences -> Scala -> Compiler -> Build manager, I can select a "buildmanager." What is the difference between "refined" and "sbt"?

Also, is this some method to integrate an sbt build file into the Eclipse IDE?

Answer 1

ScalaIDE has two build managers, basically they are interfaces between the eclipse model and the scala compiler, they have to do things like work out which resources need re-compiling and how that affects dependent code. Refined is a refined version of the original interface and sbt is, well, sbt.

SBT is the default now, and I expect refined will go away at some point.

Unfortunately the build manager is very much under the hood. There is no real eclipse project->sbt integration yet. There is an eclipse plugin for sbt which allows you to generate eclipse project files but no tight integration from an eclipse project to sbt akin to IvyDE or m2e.

You can use sbt deliver-local to create an ivy file of dependencies, and use IvyDE to keep your classpath containers up to date - that's about as good as it gets at the moment.

I wouldn't be surprised to see this situation improve though - check out the roadmap.