How to remove the explicit dependencies to other projects' libraries in Eclipse launch configuration

Posted by euluis on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by euluis
Published on 2010-05-17T23:57:38Z Indexed on 2010/05/18 0:00 UTC
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In Eclipse it is possible to create launch configurations in a project, specifying the runtime dependencies from another project. A problem I found was that if you have a multiple project workspace, being possible that each project has its own libraries, it is easy to add explicit dependencies in a secondary project to libraries that are of another project and therefore subject to change.

An example of this problem follows:

proj1
    +-- src  
    +-- lib  
           +-- jar1-v1.0.jar  
           +-- jar2-v1.0.jar  
proj2  
    +-- src  
    +-- proj2-tests.launch

I don't have a dependency from the code in proj2/src to the libraries in proj1/lib. Nevertheless, I do have a dependency from proj2/src to proj1/src, although since there is an internal dependency in the code in proj1/src to its libraries jar1-v1.0.jar and jar2.v1.0.jar, I have to add a dependency in proj2-tests.launch to the libraries in proj1/lib. This translates to the following ugly lines in proj2-tests.launch:

<listEntry value="<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<runtimeClasspathEntry path="3" projectName="proj1" type="1"/>
"/>
<listEntry value="<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<runtimeClasspathEntry internalArchive="/proj1/lib/jar1-v1.0.jar" path="3" type="2"/>
"/>
<listEntry value="<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<runtimeClasspathEntry internalArchive="/proj1/lib/jar2-v1.0.jar" path="3" type="2"/>
"/>

This wouldn't be a big problem if there wasn't the need from time to time to evolve the software, upgrade the libraries and etc. Consider the common need to upgrade the libraries jar1-v1.0.jar and jar2-v1.0.jar to their versions v1.1. Consider that you have about 10 projects in one workspace, having about 5 libraries each and about 4 launch configurations. You get a maintenance overhead in doing a simple upgrade of a library, which normally must imply changes in files for which there wasn't the need for. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong...

What I would like to state is proj2 depends on proj1 and on its libraries and having this translated to simply that in the *.launch files. Is that possible?

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