Question

I’m working on a new project with a full ANT build. I use eclipse to write my code, and I would like others to be able to check out the project to have a full working eclipse workspace. I do not want to have specific user settings committed though.

What files and directories should I have in source control?

(I’d rather not just go grab a plugin – I prefer more control over what goes in the repository)

Answer 1

We just put .project and .classpath in our repository, and that’s sufficient to make it work “out of the box” for new developers. I’d like to have other stuff (run configurations come to mind), but haven’t figured out how.

We use Subversion, so I put these files in a separate directory and defined svn:externals on that directory to point to the actual code, leaving it unpolluted by IDE-specific files.

Per request in the comments, here are the external that we use. Nothing complicated going on here:

Properties on 'svn://dev/trunk/IDEs/eclipse/runtime':
  svn:ignore
    bin
    .fbprefs
    cobertura.ser
    .settings

  svn:externals
    lib/bin svn://dev/trunk/lib/bin
    runtime svn://dev/trunk/runtime