How to use Eclipse and versioning for a matrix of projects

Question

Our company develop several software products, which reuse each others packages (we use Java). Every product represented as separate Eclipse Java project and has it's own versioning repository (we use Mercurial).

When we find a bug in some shared package, we need to transfer changes to all consuming projects, and this is a hell. The key problem is that Eclipse project can be associated only with one versioning repository.

Could someone recommend some way to associate Eclipse Java project whith several versioning repositories which in ideal may be geterogeious (svn, git, mercurial) ?

Answer 1

This should really be addressed with:

• git submodules or
• mercurial SubRepos

You can modify directly from a submodule/subrepo, push to a "central" repo, and other can fetch the modifications, and then go one directory up (in the main repo referencing all the other submodules) in order to register the new commit of the new submodule/subrepo state.

The "main project" (the main repo which record all the other submodules/subrepos states) is not necessary an Eclipse project (one of the submodules can be the main Eclipse project, with project dependencies on other).

See "true nature of submodules" for more on that process, which remains "not easy", but can still be managed precisely.