Some questions about Workspace Mechanic

[Jingjie Jiang]

Hi everyone, I have read the documents regarding Workspace Mechanic, but I am still a little bit confused by some points. So I post my questions here, Thanks very much if anyone can answer them :)

Q1: As far as I can see, there is not any build-in version management system to manage the tasks. So, if I want to manage different versions of the task, I need to use system like Mecurial,  right?

Q2: If an user want to check the settings of a task, the only way is to open the task files, e.g. *.epf and *.class, am I right?

Q3: In the part of the documents of the Mechanic "Future work on Mechanic", you mentioned that "There are many ways to enforce constraints on Eclipse users: plugin_customization.ini for preference settings, and other constraints that effectively lock down some of the flexible natures of Eclipse. These are good constraints, and appropriate in the right setting. The Workspace Mechanic isn't currently designed to deal with those very specific situations." If I don't misunderstand it, does it mean that in some cases, some locked down natures (locked down by some constraints) of Eclipse are useful. The Mechanic should be able to deal with specific situations, e.g. turn on the natures in a speciifc scenario, Is that right?

[Alex Blewitt]

On 8 Jan 2014, at 18:40, Jingjie Jiang <chygo...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone, I have read the documents regarding Workspace Mechanic, but I am still a little bit confused by some points. So I post my questions here, Thanks very much if anyone can answer them :)

Q1: As far as I can see, there is not any build-in version management system to manage the tasks. So, if I want to manage different versions of the task, I need to use system like Mecurial,  right?

You could use an external version control system to look after the tasks, yes. You could also use a URL in the task to point to the location in your SCM via HTTP so that you didn’t even need to check it out each time.

Q2: If an user want to check the settings of a task, the only way is to open the task files, e.g. *.epf and *.class, am I right?

You only need to edit the .epf files; you shouldn’t need to edit any .class files.

Q3: In the part of the documents of the Mechanic "Future work on Mechanic", you mentioned that "There are many ways to enforce constraints on Eclipse users: plugin_customization.ini for preference settings, and other constraints that effectively lock down some of the flexible natures of Eclipse. These are good constraints, and appropriate in the right setting. The Workspace Mechanic isn't currently designed to deal with those very specific situations." If I don't misunderstand it, does it mean that in some cases, some locked down natures (locked down by some constraints) of Eclipse are useful. The Mechanic should be able to deal with specific situations, e.g. turn on the natures in a speciifc scenario, Is that right?

No, the mechanic can not turn on natures in specific scenarios. It basically allows you to monitor and modify any changes stored in IEclipsePreferences, but perspectives and some other settings (e.g. Mylyn) do not use this and so cannot be monitored/modified by workspace mechanic.

Alex

[Jingjie Jiang]

Thanks very much for your reply, Alex. The explanations are very clear :)