Description Pascal Filion 2001-12-12 19:43:34 EST

This description is taken from the newsgroup from myself and Paul. Tried with 
eclipse-SDK-20011206-win32.

If you have this structure on you hard disk

C:\
   |- ProjectX
         |- Development
         |         |- Classes
         |         |- Source
         |- Testing
                  |- Classes
                  |- Source

(1) You create ProjectX and the location is ProjectX. You add
Development\Classes and Development\Source into that project.
(2) After that, you create ProjectXTest. You add Testing\Classes and
Testing\Source.
Problem -> Eclipse does not allow you to do that since ProjectX is already
using the location C:\ProjectX.
Problem -> Also, it is not possible to create the project in
ProjectX\Testing since it is a sub-directory of ProjectX.
Cause -> It seems one of the problem is the file .classpath which (in my
opinion) should be located in the project (which is in the workspace) and
not in ProjectX. I tried: Create ProjectXTest in a different location with
the same structure. Close Eclipse. Manually change the location in the .prj
file. Reopen Eclipse. That does not work.

Nor does it handle the case where you have many interrelated projects with
common directory structure (which is dictated by source code control)

|- CommonProject
    |- CommonResources
    |- SourceFiles
    |    |- Subproject1
    |    |- Subproject2
    |    |- etc.
    |- ResourceFiles
        |- Subproject1
        |- Subproject2
        |- etc.

If you could create Eclipse projects and then specify certain folders to
include in them, you could conceivably choose the same root folder for more
than one project.
i.e.
EclipseProject1
    - root folder: /CommonProject
    - source folder: /CommonProject/SourceFiles/Subproject1
    - source folder: /CommonProject/ResourceFiles/Subproject1
    - build folder: /CommonProject/Subproject1

EclipseProject2
    - root folder: /CommonProject
    - source folder: /CommonProject/SourceFiles/Subproject2
    - source folder: /CommonProject/ResourceFiles/Subproject2
    - build folder: /CommonProject/Subproject2

Assuming, of course, that project specific files (such as .classpath) are
associated more closely with their project (such as
EclipseProject1.classpath, etc.) ...

Eclipse projects could still control all files within them, but they
wouldn't have to have every file *that exists within the directory
structure* within them.  Note that the two projects above do not intersect
control of any files, so all files can still be controlled as explained
below in another thread.