[ome-devel] Eclipse metadata in bio-formats.git

[Curtis Rueden]

Hi everyone,

Since I wrote the mail below, I have been doing more development of
Bio-Formats in Eclipse, and am more convinced than ever that having the
Eclipse metadata files committed to the repository is harmful. Using M2E,
even if you tell Git to treat the .classpath, .project and .settings files
as unchanged, it still refuses to switch branches due to local changes.
Also, using "git stash" will stash those files, reverting them to the last
version from the repository, which wreaks havoc with Eclipse.

Hence, I am renewing my proposal that these Eclipse metadata files be
removed from the Git repository. If it helps, I would be happy to write a
"Developing Bio-Formats in Eclipse" section of the Bio-Formats web site
detailing how to get M2E etc. set up in Eclipse—it is pretty simple.

Any objections?

-Curtis

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 4:54 PM, Curtis Rueden <ctrueden at wisc.edu> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> This is a question for those who use Eclipse to develop Bio-Formats code.
>
> Recently, I added pom.xml files to the Bio-Formats source tree, so that
> Maven can function as a parallel build system. This has the nice side effect
> that it is very easy to import those projects into Eclipse, using the
> m2eclipse plugin. This plugin takes care of generating Eclipse metadata
> files (.classpath, .project, and .settings/*) to match the POM's metadata,
> and keeps it up to date as project dependencies change. In particular, it
> automatically switches between Project and Library (JAR) build path entries
> when dependent projects are opened and closed, which is a very nice feature.
>
> Unfortunately, bio-formats.git already has Eclipse metadata committed to
> the repository. When using m2eclipse with Bio-Formats, these metadata files
> are overwritten, and Git sees a slew of changes in the working copy. While
> it is possible locally to instruct Git to ignore such changes (see
> http://www.pagebakers.nl/2009/01/29/git-ignoring-changes-in-tracked-files/),
> my preference would be to remove the Eclipse metadata files from Git
> altogether, and suggest that people use the m2eclipse plugin to develop
> Bio-Formats from within Eclipse. This solution has the added benefit that we
> no longer need to keep our dependencies in sync between the Ant
> build.properties files, the Maven pom.xml files, and the Eclipse .classpath
> files, but rather only between Ant and Maven.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Thanks,
> Curtis
>
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