Description gossi 2016-04-21 10:30:30 EDT

I realized some stability problems with symlinks used in build path folders. For my setup I do use the eclipse composer plugin plus my composer plugin for local development [1], which creates symlinks for packages that are locally available. The result is that some folders under my vendor/ directory are symlinked, though are in the build path for that project. So far so good. This works, if everything is manually executed. However, I figured out two situations where symlinked build path folders are instable.

1) On eclipse startup. Right after starting eclipse those folders are empty. Normally all symlinked folders are marked with a special icon (folder icon + the little arrow on the upper right). Though on startup it's just the normal folder icon, which is also empty.
To get this back up again: Refresh the project rsp. vendor/ folder (F5) and right click project > Composer > Update BuildPath (Looks to me symlinks are ignored on initial building the workspace after eclipse startup)

2) This comes in more "randomly". Well, I can at least give a hint for that useless "random". My workspace is setup to "Refresh on access" and "automatically build", sometimes even "Refresh using native hooks and polling" (atm its off, to much of a performance downer with my current setup) (Settings > General > Workspace). Due to these filesystem refresh it occasionally happens that symlinks are ignored. It's the same situation as described under (1). Instead of the symlink folder icon, it is a normal folder icon and it's empty. Same strategy to get this back up again as in (1).

In the end both scenarios may have the same origin. Yet it's annoying to get your workspace set up over and over again.