danieldbower
commented
12 years ago Like everything, there are pros and cons. In this case, we are starting everyone in the same environment, and I opted to include the sts project files as it makes it slightly easier to get people up and running. I imagine once we have a contributor that diverges from this standard configuration we will remove those files, but in the interim I think the benefits of including them outweigh the cons.
In open source communities contributors will use different editors or IDEs, or just different versions of the same IDE. Even those who use the same IDE might prefer vastly different project configurations. When users customize these settings it shows up as noise in >git status, and there's a danger that one user's preferences might be committed accidentally, overriding the existing setup.
We used to include these files with the uPortal project, but (after discussion and consideration) removed them several months ago. IDE setup should be left to individual preference.