[lyo-dev] Storing eclipse IDE specific files in eclipse/Lyo repositories

["Jim Amsden" <jamsden@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The question came up about a consistent
policy with respect to ignoring or including eclipse IDE specific files
in eclipse/Lyo repositories. The files are .project, .classpath and .settings.

The .project file contains the eclipse
project definition and is useful for loading eclipse project directly from
the eclipse.org Git repositories using Egit. The .classpath file contains
the classpath entries used by the eclipse builder. The .settings folder
contains additional eclipse resource, jdk and m2e preferences. 

Although OSLC4J is built using Maven
(and m2e in eclipse), it is also convenient to have your eclipse environment
in sync with the maven pom.xml file so that you can leave eclipse automatic
project build on and see compilation errors and other problems directly
in the problems view without having to execut an m2e command. You can make
sure your eclipse environment is in sync with Maven pom.xml by using m2e
Maven > Update Project. This updates the eclipse project setting to
correspond to the directives in the pom.xml file.

If a user of OSLC4J is not developing
using eclipse, then these files are of no use and could be seen as cluttering
their working directories. 

However, eclipse/Lyo is an eclipse.org
Technolgoy project, eclipse is often used in OSLC development, and the
various folders in the eclipse/Lyo Git repositories were and are eclipse
projects. Since these eclipse environment files are small, and typically
hidden from view, I think the benefit of saving these files in the Git
repositories to simplify OSLC development using eclipse outweighs the costs.

So unless anyone disagrees, we should
not include .project, .classpath and/or .settings/ in the .gitignore files
so that these files are available for reuse in eclipse. 

Note that there may be no guarantee
that these eclipse property files are in sync with any particular nightly
or other build of eclipse/Lyo or OSLC4J. Eclipse developers are advised
to ensure their environments and the pom.xml files for any eclipse/Lyo
project are in sync if they wish to leverage eclipse build.






Jim Amsden, Senior Technical Staff Member
OSLC and Linked Lifecycle Data
919-525-6575