Eclipse projects in VCS

Question

What Eclipse specific files should I add to the VCS (Subversion, GIT, etc...) when sharing an Eclipse project?

What I have here:

.autotools
.cproject
.project
.settings/

Answer 1

Just stumbled upon this and had the same problem some time ago, so I will try to share my experience.

First it depends on who are the other users of the VCS or better what programs they will use. If they do not use Eclipse these files will only pollute their projects. If they do use Eclipse the files might be of use to them, but in my latest project I did not include them for the following reasons:

Everyone had another system which meant other paths for the includes and so on. Concluding from this I surveyed the contents of these files to see if they should be used:

• .cproject: The includes are listed here, so you will have different files in the list on each platform. -> leave out

• .project: Found some environment dependent paths here too. Maybe it also has a problem when there are different plugins installed. -> leave out

• .settings: It might make sense sometimes to share the settings but usually it is each developers own decision. -> leave out

• .autotools: I did not use this, so I cannot say anything about it.

Summary

It seems best to leave those files out of the repository.

For Eclipse this introduces the problem of creating a new project when importing from the VCS. In this case you should give advice on how to configure the project to set it up correctly.

When you put the project files into the VCS those who do not use Eclipse will probably have less problems than those who do, because the files are simply ignored at their site while the Eclipse users will have to reconfigure them for their system.

Maybe there is some better way to share those projects but I did not find one yet.