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The ide should provide a way for the user to define locations of files. One use case for this is for defining libraries for a project. The project system now is well designed and separates project-specific and user-specific information in different repositories. If we consider the case of a project that uses a library (say regexp library from apache for regular exception handling): The physical location for the jar is of course user-system specific but the fact that regexp library is used is really project-specific info. The ide should provide a way for the user to define something like regexp.lib.dir which should be part of project-specific data and the relative path of the actual jar with respective to regexp.lib.dir should go in user properties. This way when the project is moved, there would be a broken reference that the ide can notify the user of. (In the current situation, the user is required to manually figure this out). I am creating this issue under core because i am not sure if this is something that can be handled by individual sub-systems like project or ant plugins. The feature must be integrated in the core ide so that it is seamless to all other sybsystems. Perhaps this belongs to openide category...
The specific usecase cited here is also being followed up at: issue 44035 I still think it would be a nice feature to support user-defined aliases for directories that is registered with the ide and is 'understood' by ide and its modules. Perhaps issues like 44035 can then make use of this feature for their implementation.
A similar request has been made and discussed at: http://www.netbeans.org/nonav/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=109605 > A better solution is to reference jar files on classpath using an environment variable. Instead of > /home/viggo/.m2/repository/com/sun/faces/portlet/jsf-portlet/1.2/jsf-portlet-1.2.jar > it should have been like this > $M2_HOME/com/sun/faces/portlet/jsf-portlet/1.2/jsf-portlet-1.2.jar where M2_HOME is an environment variable referring to > /home/viggo/.m2/repository I am not closing this as a duplicate of issue 109605 because i am requesting for a feature that lets us arbitrarily declare user-defined strings and somehow associate a meaning to it. One possible 'meaning' would be 'the parent dir for one of my libraries'. I myself think it would be better to provide such a feature and then library and project subsystems to use that feature, than to directly implement the feature in the subsystems.
An nbusers thread that makes a similar request: http://www.nabble.com/Shared-libraries-in-6.1-td16467814.html
See also: issue 44035
I just commented on that post with explanation how to do it. This enhancement seems to me fixed in NB6.1 - choose libraries folder and in nblibraries.properties specify content. Do you agree? Thanks, -D
I agree the the solution provided does solve library-sharing issue very nicely. - My request was for the ability to define a random string (like my.prj.folder) and associate it with a folder. Such a string should then become usable everywhere in the ide that expects folder names. This will possibly indicate a custom extension of FileChooser dialog. My request thus is not limited to library-sharing. Another usecase would be the location of jdk-platform used by projects. It would be nice if the build-scripts etc used a variable to determine the jdk-platform-location. That way when the project is moved to another machine, ide can easily check if the jdk-platform set for the project is still valid. I realise that my above request should be fleshed out by me before I expect further evaluation. To that end, I am marking this issue with the keyword 'INCOMPLETE' and will close this bug as LATER. - Regarding library sharing, if users are not satisfied with the current implementation, we will request them to continue the discussion at 44035.
CLOSED/LATER has no sense -> reopening to close again
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