Hi All:

I'm going about implementing a way to use variables in the archives paths, such as in fileset base directories or archives destination folders and things of that nature. Part of this is partly in response to JBIDE-1406 (where the project name is coupled to the path).

My question to you users is, what do you suggest in terms of User Interface to declare and set these variables? The goal of course is to be able to have something like dir="${myfavoriteproject}/folder/under/it" or dir="${globalfolder}/here/there/everywhere".

Eclipse has some variable mechanisms in it already, but neither of them seem ideally suited to what archives would need. One of them is visible at window -> preferences -> general -> workspace -> linked resource. At this preference page, you can store a bunch of file-system absolute paths for use when creating linked resources. This choice is less than ideal because all paths must be absolute, so you can't do something like: ${someabsolutepath}/folder/${someRelativePath}

A second option would be in window -> preferences -> Java -> Build Path -> Classpath Variables, but this one is also less than ideal. It would force Archives to be dependent on the eclipse java plugins, but also it just doesn't seem to "fit". It seems a bit kludgey to use the classpath variables page as a means to store paths for use in archives. Also, these paths must also all be absolute.

The third option, of course, is to make a similar user interface and preference page for practically a clone of these pages but without the restrictions they come with.

Your input is desired ;)