Many ideas, requests, and issues have been raised during discussion of the flexible workspaces plan item. This document attempts to capture those requests, and provide pointers to related documents and/or bug reports. Note that appearance of a request or issue here does not imply that a solution is committed for Eclipse 3.2.

EFS features

• Exclusion filters. It is sometimes useful to be able to operate on a subset of the files and directories in a particular file system. For example, a plugin might want to filter out its private metadata files, or a user may want to exclude from view a large sub-directory that they are not using. The EFS would be a good place to add exclusion (and possibly inclusion) filters in a way that is opaque to other clients of a file system. See bug 84988.
• File system change notification. Some file systems provide native support for notification when the file system changes. The resources plugin has an extension point for plugging in refresh providers, but EFS currently has no support like this. See bug 112980, and bug 108697 for Linux inotify support.
• Composite file systems. EFS providers may want to implement composite file systems that delegate file system operations to different underlying file systems. For example, a writable file system could be overlayed on a read-only file system to allow writes to occur on a file system that would not otherwise be writable. Or, a write through cache could be implemented for a slow file system by adding a transient local file system on top of a network file system. See bug 112938.
• Support for native symbolic links. Java provides no API for identifying and working with symbolic links, and there is no explicit support for this in the IResource API either. The EFS API might be a good place for such support. See bug 44107.

Resources plugin features

• Overlapping projects. Currently, there is some limited support for overlapping resources through linking. For example, a linked folder in one project can point to a folder in another resource. This overlapping is currently not permitted at the project level. Consider relaxing this limitation to provide more support for existing file system layouts that hierarchically nest project-like groups of files and directories. If desired, exclusion filters could be used to ensure that overlapping portions of projects are not duplicated. See bug 44967.
• Arbitrary depth linked resources. Linked resources have the current limitation that their parent resource must be a project. Consider relaxing this limitation to allow resources to be linked at arbitrary depth in the workspace. See bug 73695.

UI features

• The Java development tools have a notion of inclusion and exclusion filters, and UI is provided for configuring these filters. If the resources plugin provided similar inclusion and exclusion filters, the platform UI should provide building block pieces for configuring these filters. Ideally, JDT and platform should be using the same building blocks to ensure the GUI is consistent. See bug 103213.
• A common dialog or widget set is needed to allow the user to select a file or directory in an arbitrary file system. For example, this is needed by new project wizards that want to allow users to create projects stored in an arbitrary file system. See bug 116414.

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