@blakeyrat said:

@kilroo said:
Whereas if you install Aptana as an Eclipse plugin instead, Eclipse will ask you to choose your workspace location on first run (although what it suggests as the default is still incorrect, as I recall).

Still broken. Remember: Windows doesn't guarantee that user profile special folders stay in the same place from login-to-login. If you write a static path once at install, your program will break the instant that special folder is moved.

I wish people could either:
1) Just take my word that it's broken beyond belief
2) Actually engage their brains before typing things like the above, and realize: hey even that behavior is still broken, so then I wouldn't have to
Or possibly 3) admit to themselves they don't know shit about how Windows works, and they shouldn't be commenting on it until they've educated themselves.

It was not my intent to claim that the behavior wasn't still broken, although <PD>I don't personally have any trouble believing that it is.</PD> I initially set out to explain what, specifically, Aptana did differently from regular Eclipse, and then I went off on a tangent regarding workarounds that could allow the program to run, despite the brokenness, even if one had fallen afoul of the situation in which it renders the application unusable. Specifically, as long as one can specify the workspace path, all one needs is a static path that can always point to the workspace. For those of us whose user profile special folders don't move, they'll do. For those who don't need the workspace to be user-specific, there are other options. I don't know whether it's possible in Windows to set up some kind of link or file system virtualization or demonic enchantment that allows one to have, for example, the path "Q:\eclipsefails" always actually point to "%APPDATA%\eclipse" (wherever that happens to be today) or not, because I've never needed to do so; if you can do that, then (while still not making Eclipse any less broken) you have yet another option.

Oh, and no, I don't understand how Windows special folders work. Since Windows 98, I've habitually avoided them (to the extent that I found it possible) until I read your Aptana bug report, and I still haven't really bothered to research anything beyond what you've said about them. I think you provided a link to additional information and I didn't even read all the way through that. And I don't understand what Eclipse is doing with workspace paths that causes entering "%APPDATA%\test" to create a directory named "%APPDATA%" (with a subdirectory named "test") inside the installation directory rather than a directory named "test" in %APPDATA%. What I do know is that Eclipse won't break due to its workspace moving if you can see to it that the workspace doesn't move, and it won't mess up your computer by storing its workspace in an inappropriate place if you tell it to store the workspace somewhere else.

...Comes to that, you could leave it set to ask for your workspace location at startup and tell it where it's moved to, if you absolutely had to. Again, doesn't keep it from being broken, just keeps it from being useless because of that particular bug. And there may be some poorly-coded plugins that store full paths instead of workspace-or-deeper-relative paths in their metadata and would get messed up if you did that.

Of course, all of that is immaterial unless one (1) can find the workaround, and (2) is willing to compromise (to the extent of using it, even if one is still going to complain bitterly). But if one weren't going to complain bitterly, we wouldn't get to read Blakeyrants, now, would we.

Now, this Maven thing, on the other hand (and to get back on topic), I'm with you on this one. The behavior you're observing makes no sense to me. If your esteemed colleagues HAVE found some obscure configuration that is actually supposed to exhibit the seemingly nondeterministic behavior you're getting out of it, I would love to know what the heck kind of circumstances are supposed to make it useful. But it seems more likely to me that what they've managed to do is find a configuration edge case that exposes a genuine bug, and that bug has splattered right smack in the middle of your windshield.

The software circles of hell: Java, NetBeans, Maven, Tomcat, and about 50,000 vaguely-named Java libraries