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Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] Preferences (topic was touched in "Eclipse smells kind of dead" thread)

On 15.07.2013 22:08, Pascal Rapicault wrote:
> Unfortunately I don't think that the JDT approach is workable for all
> preferences, and asking the user for the scope where he wants to store a
> particular preference is going to result in complex UI that will confuse
> users.

How about a global "change user configuration" switch? Flick the switch to
enter "user configuration" mode and any configurations you make anywhere
will end up in the user scope. To avoid confusion/accidental changes, this
mode could be indicated with some big notification banner in the workspace
(and the preference editor).

Add a "reset to user configuration" option to sync other workspaces by
overriding/clearing local workspace-scope preferences and voila (or maybe do
that automatically based on e.g. timestamping of the user preference store).

On 16.07.2013 09:54, Campo, Christian wrote:
> Sharing prefs between workspaces sounds good. The suggested solution
> still sounds a little bit too complicated (for my taste of course). If I
> open a workspace, why cant I not directly reference an existing workspace
> and copy the preferences from there ? (why the extra export step) And for
> completeness wouldnt it be call if all my Eclipse installations share the
> same list of know workspace locations :-) so that I dont have to add them
> again when I unpack a new Eclipse IDE.

I don't think any solution based on copying preferences between workspaces
is a good one. It gets very confusing very fast when multiple (>2)
workspaces get involved and you wish to keep them all in sync on some common
settings that could change at any time in anyone of them.


One problem with either approach is that I often encountered the case where
not everything was copyable/syncable with the available methods (i.e.
preference im/export and workspace layout copying). I often ended up
fiddling with stuff manually that didn't get across. One particular area
OTOH is position of view trims as well as position and filtering of toolbar
items. But of course those problems would just be worth individual bug
reports and have no impact on a solution strategy for the general syncing
problem.


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