Unless you are working on improvements to the eclim installer, you shouldn’t ever need to build it, but should the need arise here are the instructions for doing so.
To build the installer you first need a couple external tools installed:
sphinx: Sphinx is used to build the eclim documentation which is included in the installer.
Eclim also uses a custom sphinx theme which is included in eclim as a git submodule. So before you can build the installer you will need to initialize the submodule:
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update
graphviz: The docs include a few uml diagrams which are generated using plantuml (included in the eclim source tree) which in turn requires graphviz.
Once you have installed the above dependencies, you can then build the eclim installer with the following command.
$ ant dist