The Eclipse autotools plugin performs a make clean when opening a project, even if the project hasn't changed since the last time it was opened. This is kind of annoying on larger projects because they have to be completely rebuild every time you close and later reopen a project. I have had a quick look at the sources but I don't know enough about Eclipse to figure out where this make clean is started from. This is on an eclipse.org Eclipe Version: 3.2.0 Build id: M20070212-1330, with CDT 3.1.2. The autotools plugin is from sources.redhat.com CVS. org.eclipse.cdt.core, org.eclipse.cdt.managedbuilder.core and org.eclipse.cdt.ui are from the cdt_3_1 branch from eclipse.org CVS with the autotools plugin patches applied.
I thought Jeff had fixed this. Jeff? Jordy: please file these against eclipse-cdt.
Autotools sits on top of the ManagedMake plug-in. A fix was put in place for general building where "build project" was always invoking a clean ahead of "all". I hadn't tested it with closing/reopening a project, but just did so with my local check-out and it worked fine. Could you please attempt to update your sources and try again? The fix was put in 01/26/2007 and was built into the Fedora eclipse-cdt-3.1.1-8 for FC6.
I figured out why it wasn't working for me. It is caused by a conflict with the PDT feature ( http://download.eclipse.org/tools/php/updates/ ) from the PHP Development Tools project ( http://www.eclipse.org/php/ ). If I disable the PDT feature my autotools projects don't get make cleaned anymore every time I close and reopen them. I don't know yet why the PDT feature is causing the make clean. Thanks a lot for creating the autotools plugin. Now that I've got it working properly it is going to be really useful.