Haven't been idle the past week, but haven't made big progress yet.

Read about defining new preference defaults in "The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse" (D'Anjou et al). On page 182, it gives instructions. Haven't tried it yet, but it looks like a process only a Unix admin could love. You have to find the right plugin_customization.ini file and experiment to find out if there is a plugin default you want by changing preferences and diffing the file.

OK - so it seems a good contribution to Eclipse would be to give a way for users to edit default preferences in the UI itself, rather than having to munge around in files. Also, it seems it wouldn't hurt to have a user_customization.ini file that overlays the defaults in the active product's file so you can carry them across installs and they won't keep getting wiped. A lotta conjecture I know - need to check it out for sure. I'll try at some point to change the {$index} template variable and see if I can do it this way. At least it would solve my immediate pain while I attempt the more substantial changes required to do this fix.

That doesn't fix my problem with the class template, though. That one may be the easiest to contribute at first, because all I need to do is create a version of the same thing they have now without the brackets.

In the meantime, I tried to build the nightly build of eclipse source with eclipse. It had hundreds of errors and thousands of warnings. Hoo boy. looking at the errors, they mostly had to do with misaligned classes (have to override method x, or class Y doesn't have method z.) Eclipse as an IDE also seems to have some problems with the large number of classes in Eclipse source, and gets some errors confused. (Meaning if you click on the little error rectangle in the right side of the screen or double-click on the identifier with the red squigglies, you get an error message that doesn't match the identifier. "Method must return something" on a class name, etc...)

I wonder if I have to build the whole shebang to make a contribution - surely not. It was interesting to try. I wonder if it's because I tried the nightly and the nightly builds don't build, or if there's some magic configuration pain I have to experience before I'm worthy of a clean build.

Ahh- just looked up the definitions of the different builds on the site, and looks like nightly builds are not really builds, just whatever happens to be checked in to the head revision of source control. Not guaranteed to build. Looks like the integration or stable build is what I'd want if I wanted the thing to actually build.

OK - so onwards we go....