[Pydev-users] observations from a recent immigrant to eclipse

[Glyph L. <gl...@tw...>]

Hello there PyDev'ers,

I've recently started using Eclipse with PyDev, and (with some help from the Emacs+ plugin) it's working out pretty well.  Still, there are lots of things that I find myself missing or that don't seem to work right.  I plan to write these up for this list one at a time.

I'm happy to do the work of filing these as bug reports in the sourceforge tracker, but since I'm fairly new to this, I'm not really sure which of these are just "works as designed, get used to it", which ones are general Eclipse issues, and which ones are PyDev specific.  Hopefully this will be a good place to set me straight.

For my first issue: why do I have to manually add 'source locations' to my project?  The algorithm for detecting them should go like this:

  - Find every folder with a .py file in it.
     - Does that folder have an __init__.py in it?  If so, it's a package, not a source location; look at its parent and perform the same test until you don't see an __init__.py.
     - Otherwise, it's a source location: add it.

Any project that breaks this rule (and there are some; for example, PyOpenSSL) would also break code completion because PyDev wouldn't be able to properly tell what packages are named.

I ask this because I frequently work on projects with lots of branches, each of which has a dozen or so "source locations", and re-adding them all each time I want to look at a different branch (not to mention coming up with a unique project name, and in some cases adding multiple projects and adding links between them).

Is there some typical way to automate this process for projects with similar structure?