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eclipseconfiguration-management

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


Solution

  • 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.