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This request may be a bit far-fetched, but I find it useful to be able to do the following: Create a Simple Project on d:\ (so basically have the entire hard disk mapped as a project). Currently eclipse supports this scenario,but it is very slow. In fact, at some point I thought the wizard hanged, so I cancelled it, but then the entire app did not respond. After a while, the workbench became active and the project created. What is really needed is a way (for simple projects) to lazily load resources, without trying to discover the entire folder structure. At most, the lookup could be 2 levels deep, to properly put the +/- icon on a folder. With this functionality, I can edit any file using the eclipse editors, etc.
This is something we seriously considered early in the 3.1 cycle. Some users want to be able to browse very large data sets on servers (think at least 200K resources). In these cases lazy population of the workspace tree seems to make sense. It would allow expanding down to a given file, and opening that file in an editor, without populating the entire tree. The downside is, programmatic clients of the workspace (search, builders, etc), often want to see everything. They will implement visitors that expect to be able to traverse the entire tree. If I perform a search as a user, I expect to be able to find things in the undiscovered portion of the tree. If I start a build, I expect everything to be built. The result is that in many cases the big tree will need to be sucked into memory eventually, defeating the value of the lazy tree population. The compromise we decided on is to populate the tree eagerly, but in a background thread. Thus if I create a new project in 3.1 M6 at a location with a huge number of resources, the wizard completes quickly. Then a background job starts to refresh the contents of the project, loading the deep tree structure into memory bit by bit. In short summary, we considered this but decided it was only of limited value. I'm going to close this enhancement request. If you are experiencing problems in 3.1 M6 with the lazy loading, I suggest entering a separate bug with more details (which wizard, what kind of project, etc).
In principle, that makes sense. It would still be beneficial to have a "File System Project" that will be a very simple project, perhaps not even available to builders/etc. Its only purpose is to use it as navigator to files, etc., so various resources can be edited using the eclipse editors, without having to do File > Open and browser to those files. I will leave this close, but perhaps this is something you may consider again post 3.1
