[eclipse-dev] Workspace location on user home directory for Mac OS X

[Sancho Neves-Graca <sancho@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

Eclipse on Mac OS X 10.2 is distributed as an application package 
(extension .app). Applications on Mac OSX should be kept in 
/Applications (or /Developer/Applications). The configuration is 
defined in Eclipse.app/Contents/Info.plist. The workspace is defined by 
the line

<string>-data</string><string>workspace</string>

This results in the user's workspace being created as a subdirectory 
"workspace" of the directory where the archive was extracted (e.g., 
/Applications/Eclipse/workspace).

The problem is that any user that logs on to the machine and that 
executes the application will have his workspace at the above mentioned 
directory. All users will be working on the same workspace.

One possible workaround would be to change the line to

<string>-data</string><string>~/workspace</string>

This would place the workspace on directory "workspace" on the user's 
home directory. All users would be automatically allocated their own 
workspace directory.

I would like to suggest inclusion of this change for Eclipse 3.0 M4.

(Arguably, a similar procedure could be developed for other operating 
systems. For Mac OS X it suffices to make use of the application 
packaging conventions (Contents/Info.plist). For generic Unix systems, 
a script (run.sh) could also include the option -data ~/workspace. For 
Windows, currently the user is supposed to create a shortcut and edit 
the shortcut command. eclipse.org could adopt the convention 
%HOME%/workspace. This Windows environment variable is an established 
practice: it is recognized by Microsoft Services for Unix (SFU) and 
Cygwin as the user's home directory).

Sancho Neves-Graca