Too many reactions, so I guess I need to show the problems I am facing and react to some of the feedback I got.
- I am not a team player, since I don't work the same way as other people (this was sarcasme, but deverses an answer :)
I do work differently indeed and maybe I am not the perfect team player. Since I invest a lot of my time working (more than the required 40 hours a week), I want some satfisfaction in doing "extra" things that makes me happy or things I find challenging. My project xulux is an extension of this extra work that I like and also me running under linux instead of windows "I like to swap eclipse completely to disk even if I have memory enough" XP. Since windows has enough application specifc code, I might even think M$ did that on purpose :).. Hmm drifting of here :)
I tend to do things my way, unless someone shows me things that are better (eg scalebility, easy deploy process, release management, etc). Maybe I don't deliver these kind of things as a team, but it saves me a huge amount of usefull time.
- One thing I heard "Use classpath variables". We do now. So in most scenarios this won't be a problem anymore, but since we just type maven eclipse in the project, we don't want the .classpath and .project in cvs anyway :)
- Create a new project, commit the whole buch in cvs (including .classpath and .project). Let's assume this projects depends on velocity 1.3. I want to know if this stuff also works with 1.4-dev . I update the classpath to 1.4 and update again to use 1.3. My .classpath has changed! Even though everything is the same as it was. You say Ohh simple, just go to the resource view, right mouse button Team, Replace With Latest from repository. The resource view is not on sync with the java view, so the focus is not on the project and I have to find it manually. If I or my co-workers accidentily commit the newly set dependency we potientially have a problem or have to restore the latest .project (eg if I just added a nature to experiment with aspects) and .classpath.
I think it is best to seperate concerns. Development is also experimenting with new dependencies, other dependencies, setting project dependencies (we have about 30 seperate projects that make up our system) and you don't want those two to get mixed up. Nothing is worse than someone who by accident commited the .classpath and .project and you have to update the project and end up with conflicts in those files and this way undermine my personal settings for the development session I am currently in (eg debugging, profiling, testing, experimenting).
- I also read that someone uses the .classpath in ant to build the dependencies in ant. That's cool as an experiment, but I think the process should be the other way around : let Ant be able to drive eclipse in this respect. Not critizing the choice he made, since it seems to work great for him. Development is a completely different task then building for eg testing, releasing, etc. Development, testing and releasing often require different dependencies (developing against the latest snapshot, testing against that snapshot AND the stable release of that project and always releasing against stable releases of dependencies. Using eg mavens project.xml as the release dependency and the eclipse as the development dependency seperates these concerns in our / my scenario.
- Using mevenide was also mentioned. Since I am the initial founder of the project, which I was dead right away since I had too little time to do some serious work on that (btw MIlos & Gilles are doing a great job!) Mevenide is to be able to integrate (maven) project management in an IDE. Still you need to clearly seperate concerns here and eg have options to not automatically roundrtip changes from project.xml to .classpath and .project and especially not the other way around. It would be, at least in my vision, be bad practice for mevenide to immidiately change the project.xml or your .classpath without me knowing it after updating.
So mevenide should let the developer stay in control on what choices he/she makes during development (not saying here it doesn't though).
- The comment that not checking in the .classpath and .project files is just like not checking in the ant build.xml. I wrote enough already to make clear why I don't think these files are the same.
Als mentioned is that I should add libraries to cvs, which in my view is bad practice.
- Prashant Rane mentiones a nice solution or at least put me on track of a possible one. Adding to a cvsignore file is not an option though, since that file is already in cvs most of the time (eg the standard *.log excludes) and adding the .classpath and .project files to that file will have the result that the files will be ignored for everyone (like that since that is what I want).
Tried Window/Preferences/Team/Ignore Resource and added .classpath and .project there.. But that only works for resources not yet in cvs, so though luck for me :(.
- Where does this end ? Does everyone also put jar descriptions in cvs so they can build jars with eclipse and release that way, add eclipse launchers to cvs, etc ? (we all had that btw :)
This is getting rather a long episode and if you don't already agree with me, you probably will not in the future, but I hope you better understand my motives for not wanting those files in cvs.. The discussion goes way beyond some open source projects adding those files though (normally they tend to be more aware of what tools do and how they work and are more carefull committing bad things and this way cause less trouble than coorperate projects).
But I still hit the same issues and that is that my development settings get tampered with, without me actually wanting that.
Don't get the wrong impression : I love using Eclipse.. (afaik eclipse itself has .project and .classpath files in cvs and it seems to work ok for them too).
Maybe someone at eclipse itself can enlighten me :).
First question that is probably popping up : why do you blog if it sucks ?
Yeah.. Don't know.. I do know why blogging sucks though, you figure out why I still blog :)
- It takes time
- Is someone actually reading it besides blog robots ?
- I get about 20 spam comments a day and need to remove those (still by hand), useless time.
- Sometimes I get 900 spam comments in 30 minutes. They have to be removed too. Waste of time
- Now I have to learn Perl to remove spam comments automatically
- I don't want to learn Perl
- Sometimes comments looks like spam but isn't
- This blog is far from anonymous, so I cannot rant about everything without hurting people..
- It takes time, oh I did write that already.
- I love to rant in dutch if I want, but I don't want to scare of the blog robots or maybe some readers that don't know dutch.
- I don't want 2 blogs.. That means 2 x the work I already have with spam.
- I don't want to turn of comments.
- Got some suicide threats on my Don't smoke grass blog entry. I removed the comments btw. If you want to commit suicide because of that blog entry, you are way too far gone to be saved anyway. Sorry dude..
- When should I blog ? Every day ? Tell everyone I programmed today, pet the cat, ate some chinese (food, not people!), checked to see if my car is still running, cleaned my glasses, watched some soccer (yeah the dutch lost), talked to some people, chatted on msn with co-workers, I took my medication, that I listened to the radio, that my ex girlfriend uses cream to remove hairs instead of shaving her legs (and it is a lot softer than shaving too), I though about shaving (my face, not my legs), but since I have to do it again next week, I skipped today, that I did a big one twice today, one reading the paper and one reading some flyers Yawn
- What could I have done if I didn't blog ? Probably save the world or something I guess.
- I don't want to have responsabilities added to my list of responsabilities that I already have. Or isn't blogging making any expectations ? The useless traffic of robots, feed readers, the disappointment that I am not blogging that much for the robots and people who use feed readers, people start removing my blog since nothing ever happens there or is too boring. Presure, Deadlines are words that come to mind to keep the robots and feedreaders happy!
The reason why I blog anyway is probably something I don't want to hear!
I am in denial and probably need help from the AA for bloggers..
I tried the Blogging Anonymous, but anonymous my ass.
Maybe this is just a cry for help ? Do I want to know what to blog ?
Do I want to be famous ? Do I want to be heard ? Do I want any influence ? Do I want to make a point ? Do I care ? Should I be hospitalized for talking to myself in a blog ?
Maybe I just love collecting porn links from my comments ? Maybe I just love to remove spam comments whole day long ? Do I blog so I can meet my future wife ? Do I blog so I will never meet my future wife ?
Maybe it is just another programming challenge to solve some problems from the list.
Too many questions....
In short Blogging is kut! to actually add some dutch to my blog..
I am getting sick and tired of projects adding those files.
I am a big eclipse user (have 4 versions running, using different startup jdks, different development jdks, etc) and when there are .classpath and .project files in cvs and I checkout a project, immidiately I have to change those settings to get the system going. If a committer of such a project changes something to his eclipse setup or project setup, as soon as I update I have a conflict in the .classpath or .project file.
I normally check out projects in eclipse to do some debugging and change dependencies or check to see if the dependencies I would like to use for a certain project also work, so my local changes get also hosed if someone commits a change to the .classpath file or the .project file..
At work we also had this issue and I kept on fixing those 2 files. As soon as I started committing these files, everyone started complaining that their eclipse projects was messed up (couldn't find my jvm).
Some people actually use some options available in eclipse and therefore they are screwed when those files are in cvs..
Please add .classpath and .project files to the .cvsignore file!