CODEWITHSUNDEEP
eclipseconfiguration-management
KenK
KenK

Reputation: 263

Seeking advise for sharing Eclipse Projects

I'm looking for advice regarding best practices for sharing an Eclipse project among developers.

It seems clear to me that each developer should have his/her own Eclipse workspace. However, projects seem to loan themselves better for many users to use the same project, e.g., if several users are working on a particular component, they are all likely to need to use the component's project, since if they each had their own project, they'd each have to set up and maintain the same project dependencies, etc. Looking to see if this is what other folks do or if their are reasons to give each developer his own project for a particular component.

Also, if the recommendation is to share a project, what are recommendations for configuration managing an Eclipse project? In the past we have used ClearCase, but we are now looking to change to Git or SVN. In the ClearCase world, it would seem advisable to do frequent checkins and merges to help the team stay up to date. Again, I'm looking for opinions from folks who have already lived this.

Thanks for any recommendations or external "how to" books or websites!

Thanks,

Ken

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1050

Answers (3)

JB Nizet
JB Nizet

Reputation: 692121

Sharing an Eclipse project doesn't cause any problem. Just put the .classpath, .project files and the .settings directory (and any project-related config file/directory that Eclipse generates at the root of the project) under source control.

Also, avoid using absolute paths in your project (for external libraries, for example), since all the developers don't necessarily have the same setup and use the same locations.

Git, SVN or ClearCase : it doesn't matter : all allow sharing Eclipse files.

Upvotes: 3

Fredrik
Fredrik

Reputation: 10656

...avoid using absolute paths in your project

Good point.

We've had some issues with this in ClearCase. Our third party libs were placed in a different part of the filesystem under version control. So to avoid absolute paths to the libs we added an ant script. The script would copy the libs to a view private directory that was directly under the project root.

We then added a builder to the project to make sure that the script was run first at every clean + rebuild.

Upvotes: 0

meriton
meriton

Reputation: 70584

We put the entire eclipse project folder under version control (with an svn:ignore for the directory containing the compiled classes).

This allows us to share not only the build configuration, but also launch configurations (with the proper VM-parameters), the configuration for compiler warnings the team considers relevant, and the formatter configuration for the coding conventions in use. We can also set text file encodings that way.

Upvotes: 1

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