Third-party tool made changes to .classpath and .project files

Support
#1

For some development I use the Atom editor, and recently they’ve been adding on support for IDE functionality for languages such as Java. Eager to test this out, I’ve been periodically opening a file from my project being created with your software.

Somewhat recently, it partially worked, but as a result made some changes to some of the project files. I’m using Git, so reverting the changes won’t be a problem, but I noticed that the changes didn’t seem to change or break anything.

In each module, it modified the .project and .classpath files, with both minor and major changes. It also created a .settings/org.eclipse.buildship.core.prefs file in each module.

Are these changes a problem? I’ve built the project several times on my local machine without issue, but haven’t worked up the courage to test it on my Jelastic environment yet.

Examples of the changes:

.project

From:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<projectDescription>
	<name>MUAIPM-core</name>
	<comment></comment>
	<projects/>
	<natures>
		<nature>org.eclipse.jdt.core.javanature</nature>
	</natures>
	<buildSpec>
		<buildCommand>
			<name>org.eclipse.jdt.core.javabuilder</name>
			<arguments/>
		</buildCommand>
	</buildSpec>
	<linkedResources/>
</projectDescription>

To:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<projectDescription>
	<name>app-core</name>
	<comment></comment>
	<projects>
	</projects>
	<buildSpec>
		<buildCommand>
			<name>org.eclipse.jdt.core.javabuilder</name>
			<arguments>
			</arguments>
		</buildCommand>
		<buildCommand>
			<name>org.eclipse.buildship.core.gradleprojectbuilder</name>
			<arguments>
			</arguments>
		</buildCommand>
	</buildSpec>
	<natures>
		<nature>org.eclipse.jdt.core.javanature</nature>
		<nature>org.eclipse.buildship.core.gradleprojectnature</nature>
	</natures>
</projectDescription>

Key changes:

  • <name> (MUAIPM-<module> to app-<module>)
  • <arguments/> and <projects/> to <arguments></arguments> and <projects></projects> (likely not an issue at all)
  • Added a build command for org.eclipse.buildship.core.gradleprojectbuilder
  • Added nature org.eclipse.buildship.core.gradleprojectnature

Other than the name change, I can’t see this file’s changes being a big problem.

.classpath

This file removed all of the <classpathentry sourcepath="<thing>"> elements, of which there are many, and added <classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.buildship.core.gradleclasspathcontainer"/>.

This file is the one I am most concerned about.

.settings/org.eclipse.buildship.core.prefs

Each file is essentially as follows:

#Mon Oct 23 09:14:40 CDT 2017
connection.project.dir=../..

I’m not really concerned about these files.

Conclusion

Should I revert these automatically-applied changes? It’s possible that some changes were made to .gitignored files, but I wouldn’t know where they would be nor how to revert them if necessary. Do these listed changes give a clue as to what might need to be checked for?

#2

Hi Caden,

The files you have listed are only relevant for working with the project from the Eclipse IDE. They cannot affect your building process because it uses only build.gradle and settings.gradle. So I think it’s safe to keep these changes if you don’t see any problems in Eclipse.

#3

Great! I’m actually using Intellij IDEA for the editor, but the IDE implementation in Atom seems to prefer Eclipse files, so I’m not really using Eclipse, just its format. I’m glad this won’t affect me.

Thanks for your help!