Red exclamation in Eclipse after build - on classes dir

Question

First, there are no problems with my build path, and there's no problem in the "problems" window regarding this error. What happens is:

• I check a project out of SVN
• I then build that project
• SVN "version" and link gets removed from classes and build directories (and red ! appears)

• I can no longer commit project as a whole, as I get this error:

  svn: Commit failed (details follow):
  svn: Working copy 'C:\Users\<me>\Documents\eclipseSDK\<project>\classes' is missing or not locked
  

• It's NOT missing, it just was "refreshed" during build

I've also tried to delete the dir on the SVN side, but the red arrows still appear and committing throws an error - even though those dirs are no longer part of the checked resources.

Also, basically, any "Team" menu option will no longer work on those two dirs, if I try to Team>Add to Version Control, nothing shows up in the Resources window.

I don't even know if I care about the red exclamation as much as just getting those two dirs out of the SVN process. Like I said, I've deleted on the SVN side even, so they are no longer there.

Answer 1

Are your compiled classes file part of your Subversion repository? If so, GET RID OF THEM FROM SUBVERSION!.

Sorry about the screaming, but files that can be built (like classes and jar files) should not be stored in version control. It just doesn't make sense.

Source control allows you to see the history of changes. You can see who made what changes in the source, but you can't do that in class files or jars. Source control allows you to branch and merge changes. You can't do that with class files. And, they go stale very quickly. No one cares about class files that were built last month.

The biggest issue is sheer size. Binary files don't diff well (and many version control systems don't even try). Let's say you build 15 megabytes worth of class files each time you do a build. That's probably at least 12 megabytes added to your repository each and every time. With in a year, you could be adding, 1 gigabyte to your repository. You can easily end up with the vast majority (and I mean in the 90% range of your source repository being nothing more than compiled code. Compiled code that no one cares about. Compiled code that can't help you understand your development history. Compiled code that clogs up your repository.

Go to your classes directory, and do an revert from the Team menu on that directory. You'll lose all of your changes, but so what? They shouldn't be there. This will set things up, so you can at least commit your changes.

Then, delete that classes directory and all of its contents from Subversion and commit. Eclipse will create the directory when it does a build, and you can make the directory in Ant's build file before you compile the code. You should then set an svn:ignore property on the directory parent to prevent people from checking in the classes directory.

If you need to store jar files for other projects to use, use a release repository. In fact, use a Maven repository like Artifactory or Nexus. You don't have to use Maven. Ant can use Ivy to fetch the files from a Maven repository, or you can simply use URLs to download the files as needed via wget or the <get/> task in Ant.

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OK, I deleted [build & classes] from local, and deleted from SVN. Made a minor edit to a file, just to be able to run Commit - which worked fine.

That's good.

Both local & SVN were in sync. build & classes are (and were) part of ANT build file, so ran build again. build & classes reappeared (with ? this time), and added to svn:ignore.

Any file that's not in the repository will show up with a question mark. Those question marks will disappear if you add the svn:ignore property to the parent directory with classes, sync, and build in it.

Made another file change, but now I cannot commit the entire project, as I'm getting more/different errors now (e.g. "out of date").

The out of date means that someone somewhere modified a file that was in the repository and committed it. It's very likely that the change is one of the *.class files that you removed. You will have to do an update before a commit. When you do the update, you will likely see a lot of conflicts where a class file was changed, but you had removed it. Resolve these changes, update, and commit again.

By the way, I have a pre-commit hook that is useful in this situation. First, it can prevent people from adding that classes directory to the repository (and any files under it). Second it can make sure that the svn:ignore is setup correctly.