Announcing the Workspace Mechanic for Eclipse

If you saw the slides from my talk at EclipseCon back in March you may recall that we discussed a tool we had built for propagating preference changes across workspaces. Today, I'm happy to announce that the tool, now dubbed the Workspace Mechanic for Eclipse, has been released as open source. And, yes, it's EPL 1.0!

The Workspace Mechanic can be used in both single-user and enterprise modes to take on automating maintenance of all your Eclipse environments. Check out the project overview for details.

One of the coolest things we've added specifically for the public release is a Preference Recorder which listens to changes to preferences, and then saves them as tasks you can apply to all the other workspaces on your machine. Or, the planet. Why not?

The Workspace Mechanic has been tested on Linux and has been sanity tested on OSX. I'd love some feedback on Windows-compatibility issues, because I don't have a Windows machine to test on anymore.

Anyway, I just spent about 13 hours getting the final touches on the repository: fixing wiki content, fighting Mercurial, and finding an unpleasant bug (!) related to different versions of the JDK. (Isn't that supposed to not happen?). Drafting this post is like the last thing on my list, and I'm just all out of skill and energy, and a DVD box set just arrived, so how about I point you to the Google Open Source blog post, and I’ll go watch TV.

Please enjoy.