1. There May be Troubles Ahead
2. Errors whilst Compiling using Ant
3. Creating Eclipse Project
4. Eclipse Debugging Routines
5. wORD cASE bLINDNESS
6. Importing the Project Bugs
7. Have you Tried Restarting Your Program, Sir?
8. Show Your Bugs, Damn You!
9. Be Careful What You Wish For
10. Installing NetBeans

terracer is one of the JOSM standard plugins. Almost all of my work updating the map involves adding houses in Nottingham, and most of those are either Terraces, Semi-Detached or Detached houses; terracer is invaluable in adding any or all of those houses.

Unfortunately, terracer began to show bugs soon after I started using it, and it rapidly became impossible to use any of it’s Relation capabilities. JOSM core was being rewritten to move from JAVA-7 to JAVA-8 (now complete), and I have a suspicion that terracer was written in the days of JAVA-6! Whatever the case, it has degraded throughout 2016 & is now almost completely unusable (at least in my experience).

6 months or so ago I declared that I wanted to bug-fix terracer. I’ve spent all the time since then finding excuses to put off making that promise good. It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s simply that, whilst the weather is good enough, I want to get out of the house, make the survey, then get it up on the map. Before Xmas I caught two new ‘flu on the run; it took until Sunday, 8 January before I finally overcame the Bronchitus & felt strong again. Today the weather forecasters promised Britain a blast of Siberian air & snow by the end of this week. So, I’ve finally run out of excuses…

I’ve done a little C/C++ Linux/Windows programming + command-line x-compilation & bugfixing plus lots of PHP, HTML, javascript, database & other scripting, but have little experience with SVN & zero experience with ant, Eclipse and/or Java. So, as the Chinese proverb goes, the future should be interesting.

I’m writing this up as a Preface to the whole thing, and expect to have numerous posts in the future as I meet (and hopefully fix) yet another snag along the route. The only help I’ve been able to find so far is:

https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/DevelopersGuide

Steps taken so far:

1. This is the platform I’m using:
   ~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Debian
Description: Debian GNU/Linux 8.6 (jessie)
Release: 8.6
Codename: jessie

2. Here are relevant installed applications:
   (some results removed):
   :~$ apt --installed list | egrep -i 'ant|eclipse|jdk|subversion'

   WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface yet. Use with caution in scripts.

   ant/stable,now 1.9.4-3 all [installed,automatic]
default-jdk/stable,now 2:1.7-52 amd64 [installed,automatic]
eclipse/stable,now 3.8.1-7 all [installed]
openjdk-7-jdk/stable,now 7u111-2.6.7-2~deb8u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
openjdk-7-jre/stable,now 7u111-2.6.7-2~deb8u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
openjdk-7-jre-headless/stable,now 7u111-2.6.7-2~deb8u1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
openjdk-8-jre/jessie-backports,now 8u111-b14-2~bpo8+1 amd64 [installed]
openjdk-8-jre-headless/jessie-backports,now 8u111-b14-2~bpo8+1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
subversion/stable,stable,now 1.8.10-6+deb8u4 amd64 [installed]

3. Install sourcecode via SVN:
   (the following also creates /josm (for me, /JOSM already exists)):
   ~$ svn co http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/editors/josm

   ~$ du -h --max-depth=1 josm
24K josm/webgrabber
356K josm/i18n
533M josm/plugins
235M josm/core
428M josm/.svn
54M josm/dist
1.3G josm