Working on eclipse project in subversion

Question

All, I have a 20 member dev team working on a development project. To provide greater control we have created a workspace with necessary projects and configurations (like project preferences, set-ups etc) in IBM RAD.

The idea is to have the pre-configured project in subversion so that when the dev team members checkout the project they get a complete workspace, so that they do not have to configure setups them selves.

However the problem is everytime someone checks out the workspace IBM RAD will also edit the.metadata (and some other folders and properties file) folder that has been checked in.

Idea is the developer should not have to change anything except the source code folders or application specific files.

I think many other teams might have faced situations like this. Can anybody provide the best practices/process/references on how this is done in development projects?

Thanks

Answer 1

I think svn ignore will solve your problem. check http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch07s02.html

The svn:ignore property contains a list of file patterns which certain Subversion operations will ignore. Perhaps the most commonly used special property, it works in conjunction with the global-ignores run-time configuration option (see the section called “Config”) to filter unversioned files and directories out of commands svn status, svn add, and svn import.

Answer 2

You cannot stop IBM RAD from updating.metadata folder and Eclipse doesn't support splitting workspace folder as it does for the configuration folder.

The best solution would be to setup your build scripts to be able to setup your workspace based on some.zip file(s), where you've captured the required settings for the workspace. This will give the closest thing to automatic workspace setup without having to deal constantly with changed files in.svn.