things to hate...

1 day of heavy developing … today just building as normal, all .java files in src-folder are deleted!!! hours of work are gone

crap, crap, crap!!! now i have to invest multiple hours to find the source files again … how dumb can a program be to DELETE source files???

Do i really need to backup after every changed line of code???

WAH!
[hr]
just tried to use the “restore from local history…” feature of eclipse. WOHO files are there, clicked them and ok … nothing happens … now eclipse doesnt find anything to restore … WAH!!!

Ah, that’s terrible! Do you have any version control to restore from, or just going to have to try & recover the raw files?

I have various backups on a daily base - but that doesn’t help if you spent half a day with coding …

I have found a solution so far (because deep scanning deleted files needs some hours i was trying alternatives):

Local History stopped working - for whatever reason … so I search myself through the locale history.

you can find it there:

<workspace>.metadata.plugins\org.eclipse.core.resources.history

now you have to find the file you are searching for … normally look at the newest files there.

also android does somehow cache the data - if you open manifest, choose activity and click on “name” android magically can open the lost java file (but you cannot save) - once saved everything is gone.

So if you are smart: As soon as you get the source IN ANY WAY -> copy paste :slight_smile:

Ok, I never new about those recovery methods. Will be good to know if I ever get stuck in that situation!

At the moment, I create a new git repo for every project I start. Then when I’ve made any major change, or reached a state in the code I want to save I just do a “git commit -a”, and write a brief explanation of the changes. That way if everything falls over, at least the git history should be safe.

Of course, it doesn’t work if the whole folder is erased, along with .git :slight_smile:

How about sticking the git repo in your dropbox folder for ultimate paranoia? Of course I have no idea how healthy that is - possible conflicts introduced by the Dropbox processes?

Anyhow, git rebase ftw!

problem is, I am not willed to waste time by manually syncing sources after every line of code, just because eclipse is stupid and decides to delete source files with no reason and after that is not able to handle its local history.

eclipse was always(!) working like a beta program, that’s why I never used it when there were alternatives. Sorry for the hard words but that’s a fact, even when it is very powerful - there is no reason why that thing should delete source files. Also I cant remember how often I had to restart that thing because it interlocked itself somehow and cherks up …

rule 1: before looking in the web for solutions -> restart eclipse (works most of the times).

I am sorry, but even win95 was more stable than that.

Latest release suddenly does not rebuilt projects when a dependancy gets rebuilt :slight_smile: (maybe its an android sdk fault)

You’re right - Eclipse seems overly bloated and buggy. I really wish there was a more lean IDE for Android development, which still had the rich SDK integration Eclipse does.

I believe the problem with rebuilding projects is to do with the new “incremental builds” concept. Basically it used to try & rebuild your entire project whenever you changed something (which was ridiculously slow). In an attempt to optimise this, they reduced the scope of project building dramatically. But now I find it often doesn’t update when I want it to, and I have to manually doe a Project Clean.

it was not slow on my machine … at least not with android project. compiled in a blink of an eye - now it is slower because I have to to the following sequence:

switch to activity.class, enter space, remove space, press strg-s

before i can test the app on the device … i am already very fast with that, but still slower, than before, when building was automatically … maybe there is a switch somewhere :slight_smile:

I’ve never liked eclipse, I do most of my Android programing with just a text editor and batch files. I wrote an article on hoew to develope Android without eclipse: http://www.xdebugx.net/articlemanager/index.php?post=7

I do exactly this and love it. The origin repo is on my dropbox. I work off of a clone that is in a local (non-dropbox) folder and git push whenever I’ve finished a significant bit of code, as well as at the end of each work day.

I’ve found this is a great way to have a backed up git-based source repository without having an actual server. Two weeks ago my desktop machine went down (for the count) and I lost very little work since Dropbox had automatically backed up my repo to the cloud as well as to my other devices. Speaking of which, I am also able to leverage this setup to easily switch between developing on my desktop and laptop machines.

CAVEATS/DISCLAIMER:
It very well might be possible to corrupt the origin repository if you did a git push while the repository was in the process of being sync’d by Dropbox. I am the sole developer using my repos, and I always make sure my Dropbox is fully sync’d (glance at SysTray icons) before doing a push/pull whenever I switch between machines.
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Speaking of Dropbox, the last time I checked Dropbox offers an additional service that will record and save every revision to your files.

Theoretically, if you had this feature, and you placed your working source code in the Dropbox folder, you could at any time pull up any version of any of your source files, where “version” is not defined by when you committed them to source control, but rather by any time you hit Save.

If you desired this fine grain level of “automatic source control”, this feature could be worth a look.

That reminds me, I should get perforce installed on this machine.