on Feb 8th, 2009Tip: The Configure Menu
In the Eclipse 3.5 release (Galileo), there’s a new way for you to contribute project related actions (e.g., adding natures). Traditionally, people have contributed project related actions at the root of the menu. However, this can easily flood your menu when you right click a project in a large Eclipse install. A solution for this problem is the new Configure menu entry. Within PDE, we have already adopted this for our plug-in project conversion actions:
While this may not be a large change, it’s helpful to some adopters of Eclipse. In the end, it’s simple to adopt this for your existing contributions, so feel free to do so when you are targeting Galileo. I hope in the future, something like the Faceted Project framework comes to live in the Eclipse platform to alleviate the pain of managing project-related functionality.
The action label “Convert Projects to Plugin Projects…” is somewhat. The current selection would already imply projects, so label could be just “Convert to Plugin Projects…”. What do you think?
I agree, I filed a bug and fixed it already for 3.5M5
Thanks Eugene!
I also updated the post to mention the Faceted Project framework which kind of eliminates the need for this type of stuff.
I like that idea. Good you took care of this – the project menu certainly gets cluttered with all those contributions. I suspect it will take some time until most of the projects take advantage of this feature, though. You should mention it in the N&N.