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RE: [platform-core-dev] Re: IResource outside the workspace
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Bob's suggestion is not an alternative, it's a kludgy
workaround. Imagine a web browser that only let you visit pages at known sites.
To browse to another site you have to add a link to that site to your "network
neighborhood". This would let you set bookmarks on pages in that site, print
pages, look at the html source, email pages to other people, etc.. Would anybody
accept such a browser? No, of course not.
Rather than focus on the technical difficulties, look at
the benefits from the user's point of view. Some of the difficulties you cite
would not occur in practice because you could make acceptable simplifying
assumptions. Functionality should follow user needs not technical dictates.
Otherwise we never would have had things like, say, refactoring, because they're
extremely hard to implement and the user could just use global substitutions and
cut and paste anyway to do the same thing, right?
Just like there is a CVS repository navigator there should
be a file system navigator. It would be intuitive to me if the Resource
Navigator view were used for that, but it could be something new. Folders which
are "under Eclipse control", i.e., are Eclipse projects would have a special
icon. It should be easy to add and remove "Eclipse control" from a folder. It
should be easy to filter what is shown in the view so that only the interesting
things are shown. A few Eclipse IDE operations would naturally only be supported
in folders which are under Eclipse control.
The ultimate goal is that the Eclipse IDE should be self
sufficient. I should never be forced to open the Windows explorer, or forced to
use another editor like Textpad unless that's just my personal preference.
Everything that a tools user needs to do, everything they need to search, all
the files they need to look at or modify, should be at their fingertips inside
the IDE. This was the beauty of Emacs, and in many ways I see Eclipse as the
modern successor to Emacs.
(I have retitled the thread
because pulling resources out of the workspace is really quite unrelated to
the original discussion of putting logical things *into* the
workspace.)
My belief is that this
is a thread that quickly unravels. Would an IFile outside the workspace
appear in the resource navigator? If not, how would one browse and find one?
Would a resource visitor find it? Would resource change events be
broadcast for it? Presumably if it's a *.java file I will want to
compile it. Would I be able to put the IFile under version control with
CVS or another repository? All of this functionality requires assembling
and maintaining lots of metadata, which requires a life-cycle that allows us
to know when to start collecting that data and when it can be thrown away.
Maintaining this meta-data for your entire hard disk would not be practical.
I understand that having a strict notion of what's in the workspace
seems cumbersome, but I think it's a critical prerequisite to all the IDE
bells and whistles that come along with IResource. If one doesn't want all the
bells and whistles, it becomes a difficult slicing game to determine what
functionality makes sense on "reduced" external resources.
The alternative you suggest, on the other
hand, is more tenable. It's been possible since 2.1 to link arbitrary
files and folders into some project. With this approach the association
of the resource with the workspace, and the lifecycle of the accompanying
metadata, is well defined. As you say, this gives you most of the
IResource-based functionality "for free".
John
Bob Foster
<bob@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent
by: platform-core-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
27/07/2005 03:01 PM
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Subject
| Re:
[platform-core-dev] Re: IFile that corresponds to a logical
view. |
|
That would certainly be one way out of the current split that
divides
editor support in half, makes annotations unavailable to RCP, etc.
Pull
resources out of the workspace (and out of the IDE).
An
alternative is to pull the file system into the workspace. I did a
very
simple stab at that for my product, automatically creating a
project that
holds (if possible) the folders containing open "external"
files, (Ed, I
know you'll remember this approach), adding Browse buttons
to the wizards
and Save dialog, etc. It makes search and markers work
and allows
virtually every file to be opened as an IFile, but it's a bit
of a
hack.
Bob
Ed Burnette wrote:
> I've long thought that
IResource should be able to represent things other than "files and directories
in the local file system that happen to be in projects in the workspace". Even
local file system files outside the workspace can't currently participate as
first class citizens in the IDE (with markers and search and the other
benefits that come with being an IResource).
>
> For
related bugzilla entries see:
>
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=37935#c7
>
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=54900
>
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=37723
>
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=58179
>
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=29389
>
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