Google has recently created their workspace mechanic, which addresses the most common problem that big adopters of Eclipse has - preferences management in corporate environments. I am very happy that someone has finally noticed this problem.
However, I am not happy with installing 3rd party software to manage all the preferences. More, I do not believe it is a correct way. Eclipse, as a great platform, should offer such a functionality without the need of installing non-Eclipse plugins.
That's why I am supervising the project called 'Extended Preferences'. It is at very early stage, we are not sure if it will be welcome by Eclipse Foundation, but if you have some specific requirement which you think we should implement, just let us know.
For now, we would like to satisfy following requirements:
- ability to define during the development, which preferences can be exported
- ability to define import strategy (override, merge or reset)
- ability to create a set of preferences to distribute them amongst developers
- ability to promote project preferences to workspace preferences
- support preferences which can be shared across workspaces
- help developers to use preferences correctly (implement change listeners!)
- create migration tool
We are not sure if we will succeed, the project is at very early stage, but we are going to try hard.
I will keep you informed :)
