[News.eclipse.technology.mylar] Re: Open projects as context state

[Mik Kersten <beatmik@xxxxxxx>]

Since your workspace needs seem roughly similar to mine, here's a quick 
summary of how mine is set up:
* Over 100 Java and plug-in projects checked out from CVS and SVN 
repositories, some of these projects are huge.
* 6 working sets that define project/product boundaries (e.g. Mylar, 
Tasktop).  Thanks to working sets I only work in one Eclipse workspace.
* Package Explorer and other navigator views set to have their top-level 
elements be working sets.
* Problems list set to show only working sets that I contribute to (on 
those projects there is a policy of no warnings, and I like to keep this 
view empty).
* To keep things like text search matches reasonable I usually have my 
search scopes look through only the projects I contribute to.

For keeping my workspace focused on task I obviously use Mylar's focused 
mode on the navigator views, and as a result I almost never open and 
close projects.   Since Eclipse's indexing and search facilities work 
eagerly and on-demand, and Mylar keeps the number of my editors from 
bloating, I do not notice any noticeable performance degradation even 
with my large workspace.  Auto building is the same, once one full build 
has run, the JDT's incremental compiler means that making a change to 
one source file should not take noticeably longer no matter how many 
projects you have checked out.

Let me know if you have further questions.  I suggest trying to set up 
your working sets, and then letting the tools do their job and 
complaining when they don't or when your see any appreciable performance 
degradation.

Mik

Valentin wrote:
> Hi Mik,
>
> Thanks for replying. It may just be that I need to educate myself more about 
> Mylar and working sets. So I too am curious about how do you use Mylar with 
> working sets.
>
> Here is how I typically work. I am a committer for WTP and usually work in 
> two main areas: Web Services and XML related stuff. There are typically a 
> number of plug-ins I work on and I have those projects checked out in my 
> workspace. Relatively recently I learned about configuring the Java package 
> explorer to show working sets as top level elements and now I have two of 
> those to mirror my two main areas of interest. While not yet perfect (see 
> https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=165673) this configuration 
> allows me to open/close/synchronize multiple projects at once and - before 
> Mylar - de-clutter my workspace. I could call this the poor man's version of 
> Mylar or manual Mylar :-) .
>
> I have not used working sets extensively before using them in the Java 
> package explorer. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I can 
> superficially see, working sets do not seem to filter the plug-in set used 
> when auto-building and launching.  Intuitively it seems to that me having a 
> small number of projects in the workspace significantly speeds up tasks such 
> as indexing and auto-building. When I work on a bug fix I tend to keep only 
> one or at most two plug-in projects open. I like doing this in order to 
> minimize the possibility of a fix I made to some other plug-in I happen to 
> have in my workspace coming into the picture when I run the target platform 
> and throwing me off track.
>
> I hope this explains the benefits I'm seeing from opening and closing 
> projects.
>
> Regards,
> Valentin
>
> "Mik Kersten" <beatmik@xxxxxxx> wrote in message 
> news:es00jo$5s3$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > No, Mylar does not currently track this, and I'm curious to learn more 
> > about your use case.  What do you mean by "interfering with others"? When 
> > using a combination of Mylar and Working Sets, for many use cases it is no 
> > longer necessary to open and close projects.  So could you elaborate on 
> > the benefit that you get from the opening and closing?
> >
> > Mik
> >
> > Valentin wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > Is Mylar tracking the projects opened in the workspace as part of the 
> > > active context? In order to minimize the possibility of one bug fix 
> > > interfering with others I prefer keeping a minimum number of plug-in 
> > > projects open in my workspace, with the rest safely in the target. 
> > > Because of this, I find myself repeatedly opening and closing projects 
> > > when switching focus (without Mylar). I was wondering if you've 
> > > considered this as state to be restored when switching context. I could 
> > > see how this could (negatively) impact the context switch performance. 
> > > Any thoughts?
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Valentin