Question

.project files contain references to the project natures used in the project.

These project natures are dependent on the plugins installed on the local developers machine.

So, should this file be excluded from SVN?

Will nautures unknown to other developers cause problems?

Thanks

Answer 1

It depends on your situation.

Indications for putting them under version control:

• you are talking about a team in a company context. You should be able to enforce a common developer environment, unless you also have an organizational issue.
• everyone is using Eclipse
• you want to make it more easy for newbies to just check out the project as such from SVN (without recreating it as a new project)

Indications for not putting them under version control:

• the people (or IDEs) working on the project are very different (like in public open source projects)
• you want to also use the project on an integration server like Hudson/Jenkins. You need to use Maven or some other standardized artifact lifecycle management tool outside Eclipse then.

The best solution: Use Maven to describe your dependencies and build process completely independent of Eclipse. Afterwards use Tycho to “act as a broker” between the Maven and the Eclipse world. That way you know exactly what to put under version control and everyone will produce exactly the same builds (independent of what IDE he uses or which plugins are installed).