Eclipse Workspace/Project Setup Using Symlinks

brancheclipseprojectssymlinkworkspace

I have the following simplified setup:

~/Development/Repositories/ProjectA-trunk
~/Development/Repositories/ProjectA-branch
~/Development/workspace
~/Development/workspace/ProjectA

ProjectA is a symlink to ../Repositories/ProjectA-trunk. In an ideal world I'd be able to switch the link to point at ../Repositories/ProjectA-branch and then go refresh the project in Eclipse and be working on the branch.

In this unfortunate real world Eclipse, even though it says otherwise when importing the existing project initially, resolves the symlink and keeps the absolute path to the project in Properties>Resource>Location for "ProjectA", which is in this case ~/Development/Repositories/ProjectA-trunk. Therefore switching the symlink has no effect because Eclipse now thinks ProjectA lives at ~/Development/Repositories/ProjectA-trunk and not ~/Development/Repositories/ProjectA.

Does anybody have a solution or workaround or suggestion on how to set up your workspace to make working with branches like this work?

Best Answer

To import the project initially (assuming ~/Development/workspace/ProjectA does not currently exist):

  1. mv ~/Development/Repositories/ProjectA-trunk ~/Development/workspace/ProjectA
  2. Import ~/Development/workspace/ProjectA into Eclipse
  3. mv ~/Development/workspace/ProjectA ~/Development/Repositories/ProjectA-trunk
  4. ln -s ~/Development/Repositories/ProjectA-trunk ~/Development/workspace/ProjectA
  5. Refresh Eclipse

Whenever you want to change the branch:

  1. ln -Tfs $BRANCH ~/Development/workspace/ProjectA
  2. Refresh Eclipse
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