I'm trying to port my entire 'workspace' to a USB key (including the Eclipse executable) so that I can carry my work anywhere with me and work off the key directly.
My directory hierarchy is similar to this:
/workspace/eclipse - Where my current eclipse binary is stored
/workspace/codebase - Where I keep the root of all my eclipse projects
/workspace/resources - Where I keep all project files (images, docs, libs, etc.)
It all works perfectly fine on one system. But when I change over to another system, the USB key gets mounted on another drive. For example, on my laptop, I get 'E:\', on my PC, I get 'K:\' and at work I get 'F:\', etc, etc.
This means that because Eclipse (for 'some' reason) seems to only use full path names (including driver letters) in every single one of its configuration files (such as .classpath), nothing ever works when I want to work on another system.
I put a 'libs' directory in the base of every project and populate it with its dependent JAR files. Why doesn't it use relative names instead, so that I could specify something like "../../libs/log4j.jar"?
Anyone know how to fix this problem? Does anyone know of a workaround for this?
Update: 2010.11.09
I've recently discovered Dropbox, which allows you to sync your files online and across your computers automatically with extreme ease. It includes 2GB of free space and you can upgrade to much more if you want (for a yearly fee).
I installed it on my two laptops, my two PC's, my Linux server and my Android phone and then I created a 'workspace' directory within the 'My Dropbox' folder. From the 'workspace' directory, I then installed Eclipse and created/configured all my projects as usual. I can literally work from any computer and everything always stays perfectly in sync. This is way better than any USB key functionality and its hassle!
Have you tried using Eclipse Portable?
The only thing to keep in mind is that when switching the workspace, you need to remember to give it a relative path (like ../../Data/workspace).