custom environment vars in launch configs are removed from launch config (all the time)

[martinlippert]

I have a number of launch configs that have custom env vars defined (in the "Environment" tab in the launch config).
In my case, these are JUnit launch configs. When doing a Maven -> Update Project... all the manually configured env vars from all the launch configs are gone.

[profhenry]

We also noticed this when we were updating from eclipse 4.35 (m2e 1.x) to 4.39 (m2e 2.x).
It seems that only junit launch configs are affected, all content in

<mapAttribute key="org.eclipse.debug.core.environmentVariables">

is lost after a maven update (Alt-F5)

In addition we get some VM arguments for free

Before

<stringAttribute key="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.VM_ARGUMENTS" value="-ea"/>

After a maven update (Alt-F5) we have

<stringAttribute key="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.VM_ARGUMENTS" value="-ea&#10;-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8  -Xmx1024m   "/>

[profhenry]

Okay, the additional VM args are the surefire args which now got injected due to #1672
This is fine

[profhenry]

It seems that now also environment variables defined for the surefire plugin are also injected into the launch configs.
These might override/overrule environment variables defined in the launch config.

The sync feature between surefire and launch configs is nice, but might not be suitable for all launch configs. Is there the possibility to disable that feature for specific launch configs?

[profhenry]

There is indeed to switch for disabling this feature, you just have to put

-Dm2e.process.test.configuration=false 

in your eclispe.ini (you might even distribute this via oomph).

[reto-hoehener]

I'm also starting to observe dropped env vars in our shared junit launch configs. I tried using system properties in the VM args section instead, but they also get completely replaced.

Maybe for both VM args and env vars, add a checkbox 'include default configuration from POM' and show the computed values in a readonly textarea (VM args) / table (env vars). And then leave the custom VM-args-area and env-var-table unchanged. A bit similar to the JRE tab, where we can choose between the default project environment and a custom JRE. Although for unit test VM-args / env-vars it might be convenient to get both the defaults from the effective pom AND to be able to override and/or add some values (e.g. last one wins, like is already the case for VM options if I recall correctly).

For now I will use that switch to disable this behavior, otherwise I'm in constant danger of accidentally committing a broken test launch config. We only have very few shared unit test launch configs, so this is not affecting us heavily. What would help us a lot would be shared project specific xml formatting settings.