Hi all,
since I've started working back on gt2 I noticed that Eclipse was taking
a big amount of time to do the builds... sometime it did, sometimes not, and
I did not really understand why.
Now, fact is that I've been using the command line a lot for svn, and lately
I've been using subversive. Both of the are problematic for a very simple reason:
.svn folders are _not_ excluded from the build if a project is not shared
with an svn plugin, this means the build is spending its life copying .svn folders over
to target/classes -> oh my poor disk, and if fact my eclipse builds were using a wondrous
amount of disk time, not much cpu, always sitting on "copying resources to the output folder".
Now, if you're not using any svn eclipse plugin, you can blame the maven eclipse plugin, and in
particular this: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MECLIPSE-48 (please vote/share your
disappointment for such a fundamental missing feature).
If you're using Subversive, well, this thing does not share automatically newly imported projects,
for some rationale see this: http://forums.polarion.org/viewtopic.php?t=267&
(my take: c'mon boys, who's going to have two svn plugins installed? Anyway, give us at least
the ability to share multiple projects in one shot!).
So, what can we do to cure the above problems? Well, turns out that eclipse has a global
compiler filter that can be made to avoid the copy of .svn folders.
Recipe:
* delete all the projects from the workspace (otherwise the change in the option won't work on them...)
* go to window/preferences/java/compiler/building and change the "filtered resources" to be
"*.launch,.svn"
* re-import all your projects
* enjoy the super building speed you get now 
That's all folks
Cheers
Andrea Aime
PS: what if you're using subclipse? Well turns out that subclipse shares automatically newly
imported projects so .svn folders gets excluded from the build right away.