It's been a very long time since I did much C development and I'm trying to contribute to a PECL extension for PHP. PHP and the PECL extensions are written in C and I'd like to set up my dev environment so that I can use a nice IDE (like Eclipse) and debug my code, stepping through it within a nice GUI. I'm hoping to develop on a linux box (Ubuntu 10) rather than Windows.

The main issue I have is that I don't know how to configure Eclipse (with CDT) so that it runs the entire process: configure/make/make install and then allows me to step through my code within the Eclipse GUI IDE. I have managed to edit files and then build from the command line and then use GDB to step through the code, but that's *REALLY* tedious.

Also, the PHP source codebase is quite large and takes several minutes to build. I'm hoping I might be able to limit the build to just one particular extension rather than rebuilding the whole things.

Lastly, I'd like to avoid installing the new, possibly broken, code in order to run it. Unless I'm mistaken, the build process results in a binary being constructed in the source directory and I'd like to debug using that new binary before I bother to install it on my system.

Sorry if these questions seem really basic. Like I said, it's been awhile and I'm hoping to get back on the horse quickly.