In a temporary workspace I was able to make a copy of the "invisible"
project by importing it. I gave it a different name ("copy of ...").
Then I closed eclipse and deleted the original "invisible" project folders
and files under the main workspace area.
I restarted Eclipse and chose the main workspace. I did a refresh and it
finally acknowledged the "invisible" project location was missing and
asked if I wanted to delete it from the workspace (whatever that means).
I said yes.
Now I tried to import the renamed project from the temporary workspace
back into the main workspace. I selected the root directory of the
renamed project from the temporary workspace, but no projects were listed.
A message was displayed "Some projects were hidden because they exist in
the workspace directory" -- even though the current workspace was the
normal one and the project folders had all been deleted and no project
with the name "copy of ..." existed in it.
It seems the Eclipse is stubbornly hoarding some information about the
original project in some meta data area I cannot locate. This seems like
a very fragile, easily corruptible system. It is frustrating the heck out
of me. It seems to go against the idea of discovery of projects in the
workspace an saving project metadata in the project directory. Ideally,
we should be able to drag a project into the workspace and have Eclipse
discover it.
I have finally resorted to creating a new workspace called workspace2 and
importing all my projects into it and abandoning the original workspace.
How often I'll have to play this hopscotch, I'm wondering...
Can anyone shed some light on how Eclipse Ganymede manages its workspaces,
and where it might be hiding some configuration data that is causing a
workspace to stay corrupt, and any "housecleaning" procedures one can do
to rebuild a workspace, etc?