Le deuxième apéritif et barcamp de la communauté Open Science Toulousaine aura lieu le 24 avril à 19h00 au bar El Deseo, 11 rue des Lois, à deux pas du Capitole et de St Sernin sur le thème des biens communs.
Plus d'informations sur http://hackyourphd.org/2014/04/aperitif-open-science-toulouse-les-biens-communs/
Ils étaient une vingtaine à se (re)trouver à l’occasion du premier apéritif & barcamp Open Science à Toulouse organisé par Logilab et Hack your PhD. La plupart étaient avant tout curieux de voir qui et quoi se cachaient derrière cette annonce :
un rendez-vous périodique, informel et sympathique a pour but de favoriser les échanges entre tous les acteurs intéressés par un aspect de l’Open Science : Open Data, les rapports Sciences & Société, Open Source, Open Access, Big Data & Data Science, etc.
Curieux souvent parce qu’ils s’étaient reconnus dans l’une ou l’autre – et souvent plusieurs – de ces facettes de l’Open Science sans avoir déjà rencontré l’étiquette Open Science pour autant.
Mais alors l’Open Science : c’est quoi ?
Heureusement personne n’a asséné de définition définitive. J’ai tenté de montrer, à travers une brève présentation de Hack your PhD et de Logilab comment l’Open Science est avant tout une démarche d’ouverture dans la pratique de la recherche scientifique qui s’étend au delà du cadre du laboratoire.
L’objectif de la soirée était de permettre à la communauté Open Science locale de se découvrir ; aux acteurs de science ou d’ouverture de faire connaissance. De fait les discussions et prises de contacts informelles allaient bon train autour d’un verre et quelques tapas… et c’est donc à chacun des participants de partager ses échanges sur le thème que fait-on à Toulouse ?
Le fournisseur d’accès associatif tetaneutral nous met à disposition une liste de diffusion à l’adresse open-science-toulouse@lists.tetaneutral.net. Merci à eux ! J’invite vivement les participants à l’apéro à s’y présenter en quelques mots : faites nous part de votre perception de cet événement et partager vos intérêts et projets.
On se retrouvera bientôt pour un prochain événement qui tiendra plus de l’atelier. Quelques suggestion qui sont dores et déjà apparues : un atelier sur les outils pratiques pour être ouvert, un séminaire dans un centre de recherche universitaire, un atelier sur les alignements de données publiques et l’évolutivité des schéma de données avec CubicWeb, …
Vos propositions sont très bienvenues : la communauté Open Science Toulousaine deviendra ce qu’ensemble nous en ferons !
Ce compte rendu a été initialement publié sur le site de hackyourphd : http://hackyourphd.org/2014/02/naissance-de-la-communaute-toulousaine/
Abstract
In this post you will find one way, namely thanks to CEDET, of turning your Emacs into an IDE offering features for semantic browsing and refactoring assistance similar to what you can find in major IDE like Visual Studio or Eclipse.
Emacs is a tool of choice for the developer: it is very powerful, highly configurable and has a wealth of so called modes to improve many aspects of daily work, especially when editing code.
The point, as you might have realised in case you have already worked with an IDE like Eclipse or Visual Studio, is that Emacs (code) browsing abilities are quite rudimentary... at least out of the box!
In this post I will walk through one way to configure Emacs + CEDET which works for me. This is by far not the only way to get to it but finding this path required several days of wandering between inconsistent resources, distribution pitfall and the like.
I will try to convey relevant parts of what I have learnt on the way, to warn about some pitfalls and also to indicate some interesting direction I haven't followed (be it by choice or necessity) and encourage you to try. Should you try to push this adventure further, your experience will be very much appreciated... and in any case your feedback on this post is also very welcome.
The first part gives some deemed useful background to understand what's going on. If you want to go straight to the how-to please jump directly to the second part.
This all started because I needed a development environment to do work remotely on a big, legacy C++ code base from quite a lightweight machine and a weak network connection.
My former habit of using Eclipse CDT and compiling locally was not an option any longer but I couldn't stick to a bare text editor plus remote compilation either because of the complexity of the code base. So I googled emacs IDE code browser and started this journey to set CEDET + ECB up...
I quickly got lost in a jungle of seemingly inconsistent options and I reckon that some background facts are welcome at this point as to why.
Up to this date - sept. 2013 - most of the world is in-between two major releases of Emacs. Whereas Emacs 23.x is still packaged in many stable Linux distribution, the latest release is Emacs 24.3. In this post we will use Emacs 24.x which brings lots of improvements, two of those are really relevant to us:
Very basically, Emacs used to read the user's Emacs config (~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el) which was responsible for adapting the load-path and issuing the right (require 'stuff) commands and configuring each library in some appropriate sequence.
Emacs 24 introduces ELPA, a new package system and official packages repository. It can be extended by other packages repositories such as Marmalade or MELPA
By default in Emacs 24, the initialisation order is a bit more complex due to packages loading: the user's config is still read but should NOT require the libraries installed through the package system: those are automatically loaded (the former load-path adjustment and (require 'stuff) steps) after the ~/.emacs or ~/.emacs.d/init.el has finished. This makes configuring the loaded libraries much more error-prone, especially for libraries designed to be configured the old way (as of today most libraries, notably CEDET).
Here is a good analysis of the situation and possible options. And for those interested in the details of the new initialisation process, see following sections of the manual:
I first tried to stick to the new-way, setting up hooks in ~/.emacs.d/init.el to be called after loading the various libraries, each library having its own configuration hook, and praying for the interaction between the package manager load order and my hooks to be ok... in vain. So I ended up forcing the initialisation to the old way (see Emacs 24 below).
CEDET is a Collection of Emacs Development Environment Tools. The major word here is collection, do not expect it to be an integrated environment. The main components of (or coupled with) CEDET are:
To add some more complexity, CEDET itself is also undergoing heavy changes and is in-between major versions. The last standalone release is 1.1 but it has the old source layout and activation method. The current head of development says it is version 2.0, has new layout and activation method, plus some more features but is not released yet.
Since Emacs 23.2, CEDET is built into Emacs. More exactly parts of some version of new CEDET are built into Emacs, but of course this built-in version is older than the current head of new CEDET... As for the notable parts not built into Emacs, ECB is the most prominent! But it is packaged into Marmalade in a recent version following head of development closely which, mitigates the inconvenience.
My first choice was using built-in CEDET with ECB installed from the packages repository: the installation was perfectly smooth but I was not able to configure cleanly enough the whole to get proper operation. Although I tried hard, I could not get Semantic to take into account the include paths I configured using my EDE project for example.
I would strongly encourage you to try this way, as it is supposed to require much less effort to set up and less maintenance. Should you succeed I would greatly appreciate some feedback of you experience!
As for me I got down to install the latest version from the source repositories following as closely as possible Alex Ott's advices and using his own fork of ECB to make it compliant with most recent CEDET:
Install Emacs 24 as you wish, I will not cover the various options here but simply summarise the local install from sources I choose.
Create your emacs personal directory and configuration file ~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/ and ~/.emacs.d/init.el and put this inside the latter:
;; this is intended for manually installed libraries
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/")
;; load the package system and add some repositories
(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives
'("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/"))
(add-to-list 'package-archives
'("melpa" . "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/") t)
;; Install a hook running post-init.el *after* initialization took place
(add-hook 'after-init-hook (lambda () (load "post-init.el")))
;; Do here basic initialization, (require) non-ELPA packages, etc.
;; disable automatic loading of packages after init.el is done
(setq package-enable-at-startup nil)
;; and force it to happen now
(package-initialize)
;; NOW you can (require) your ELPA packages and configure them as normal
Using the emacs commands M-x package-list-packages interactively or M-x package-install <package name>, you can install many packages easily. For example I installed:
Choose your own! I just recommend against installing ECB or other CEDET since we are going to install those from source.
You can also insert or load your usual Emacs configuration here, simply beware of configuring ELPA, Marmalade et al. packages after (package-initialize).
Get the source and put it under ~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/cedet-bzr. You can either download a snapshot from http://www.randomsample.de/cedet-snapshots/ or check it out of the bazaar repository with:
~/.emacs.d/site-lisp$ bzr checkout --lightweight \ bzr://cedet.bzr.sourceforge.net/bzrroot/cedet/code/trunk cedet-bzr
Run make (and optionnaly make install-info) in cedet-bzr or see the INSTALL file for more details.
Get Alex Ott's minimal CEDET configuration file to ~/.emacs.d/config/cedet.el for example
Adapt it to your system by editing the first lines as follows
(setq cedet-root-path
(file-name-as-directory (expand-file-name
"~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/cedet-bzr/")))
(add-to-list 'Info-directory-list
"~/projects/cedet-bzr/doc/info")
Don't forget to load it from your ~/.emacs.d/init.el:
;; this is intended for configuration snippets (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/") ... (load "config/cedet.el")
restart your emacs to check everything is OK; the --debug-init option is of great help for that purpose.
Get Alex Ott ECB fork into ~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/ecb-alexott:
~/.emacs.d/site-lisp$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alexott/ecb/
Run make in ecb-alexott and see the README file for more details.
Don't forget to load it from your ~/.emacs.d/init.el:
(add-to-list 'load-path (expand-file-name
"~/.emacs.d/site-lisp/ecb-alexott/"))
(require 'ecb)
;(require 'ecb-autoloads)
restart your emacs to check everything is OK (you probably want to use the --debug-init option).
Create a hello.cpp with you CEDET enable Emacs and say M-x ecb-activate to check that ECB is actually installed.
Now, it is time to tune your configuration. There is no good recipe from here onward... But I'll try to propose some snippets below. Some of them are adapted from Alex Ott personal configuration
You can use the following lines just before (semantic-mode 1) to add to the activated features list:
(add-to-list 'semantic-default-submodes 'global-semantic-decoration-mode) (add-to-list 'semantic-default-submodes 'global-semantic-idle-local-symbol-highlight-mode) (add-to-list 'semantic-default-submodes 'global-semantic-idle-scheduler-mode) (add-to-list 'semantic-default-submodes 'global-semantic-idle-completions-mode)
You can also load additional capabilities with those lines after (semantic-mode 1):
(require 'semantic/ia) (require 'semantic/bovine/gcc) ; or depending on you compiler ; (require 'semantic/bovine/clang)
If you want to use auto-complete you can tell it to interface with Semantic by configuring it as follows (where AAAAMMDD.rrrr is the date.revision suffix of the version od auti-complete installed by you package manager):
;; Autocomplete
(require 'auto-complete-config)
(add-to-list 'ac-dictionary-directories (expand-file-name
"~/.emacs.d/elpa/auto-complete-AAAAMMDD.rrrr/dict"))
(setq ac-comphist-file (expand-file-name
"~/.emacs.d/ac-comphist.dat"))
(ac-config-default)
and activating it in your cedet hook, for example:
...
;; customisation of modes
(defun alexott/cedet-hook ()
...
(add-to-list 'ac-sources 'ac-source-semantic)
) ; defun alexott/cedet-hook ()
;; if you want to enable support for gnu global (when (cedet-gnu-global-version-check t) (semanticdb-enable-gnu-global-databases 'c-mode) (semanticdb-enable-gnu-global-databases 'c++-mode)) ;; enable ctags for some languages: ;; Unix Shell, Perl, Pascal, Tcl, Fortran, Asm (when (cedet-ectag-version-check) (semantic-load-enable-primary-exuberent-ctags-support))
Once CEDET + ECB + EDE is up you can start using it for actual development. How to actually use it is beyond the scope of this already too long post. I can only invite you to have a look at:
CEDET provides an impressive set of features both to allow your emacs environment to "understand" your code and to provide powerful interfaces to this "understanding". It is probably one of the very few solution to work with complex C++ code base in case you can't or don't want to use a heavy-weight IDE like Eclipse CDT.
But its being highly configurable also means, at least for now, some lack of integration, or at least a pretty complex configuration. I hope this post will help you to do your first steps with CEDET and find your way to setup and configure it to you own taste.