Yesterday, one of the user of Tatoo (a compiler compiler) email me because he wants to contribute but he wasn't able to compile Tatoo in Netbeans without any errors.

My first thought was something like "you want to hack Tatoo but you are not able to configure your IDE, hoho"

Tatoo currently compiles with an Ant script or using Eclipse, why not try to compile it using Netbeans by myself, after all, reading some recent blogs, it seems that Netbeans is a good competitor of my "old buddy" Eclipse. And better, there is a netbeans plugin that can import an eclipse project in Netbeans. Cool, nothing to do.

The Ant script of Tatoo is a little bit complex, some parts are bootstraped, the Tatoo grammar compiler is created using Tatoo. So I was prepared to have to add classpath and other gory details by hands.

So I tried the import assistant, super, no problem, the import works. But after one or two seconds the Netbeans editor raises the weirdest error I have ever seen. I take a shoot.

If you don't see the problem, the compiler emits an error because it doesn't find a class that is in the same package, strange, is it ? Moreover, at the same location, it emits a warning saying that the class is in the same package so I don't need to import it. duh ??

So i've reverted my opinion about the contributor that use netbeans every day, he is able to hack Tatoo :)

cheers,
Rémi

PS: The last sentence is voluntarily provocative.