[Soot-list] Experience getting started with soot

[thjacobs at umich.edu]

The purpose of this email is to let those involved with this project know about
some of the difficulties I had trying to get started with soot so that
hopefully the problems that do exist can be corrected, and you can all help the
next guy.

The first problem I came upon was with trying to compile the eclipse plugin
source code. I didn't realize that I needed to download the extended libraries
from eclipse. Does it say anything about this on your website? If it does, then
its totally my bad for not reading your instructions. If not, it might be
helpful to put something up about it. Also, as a side note, when I did realize
I could get these packages through eclipse (duh) the eclipse download didn't
work (timed out. Tried 3 or 4 times yesterday, and just tried again today). Not
your problem, I know, but frustrating.

Second problem I had was that it seems like the jasmin code has been changed
from the version most of you are using. I got the latest of soot using
subversion and tried to compile with the jasmin jar, but it wouldn't work. In
particular, the JasminOutputStream class had bugs. I actually had to download
the Jasmin source, fix THAT (they're missing a case statement for handling
double backslashes), save the data from the JasminOutputStream to a temporary
file, and feed that file to the changed Main class of Jasmin.

I hope this is helpful to you.

Much thanks to Jennifer Lhotak and Patrick Lam for getting me straightened out
with this.