Don't try this at home! – Switching workspaces between different Eclipse versions

I pointed Eclipse 3.0 to a workspace that I had in 2.1.3, fully aware of the fact that the new eclipse version is built on cool new stuff like OSGI. It was a snap switching to the old workspace, no fiddling with command line args, just the flick of a menu item and it does the job. Very cool.

Now the bad part: I tried to start a runtime workbench from 3.0. It complained about some missing plugins. I prompty turned on all plugins from the debug configuration. At this point, I was expecting the build (which runs on separate thread) to show me some API incompatibility errors, but none was shown.. perhaps it was not done, or it did not run at all. When it tried launching, it errored out and gave me an option to open a log file that did not exist. Now the worst part is when I went back to 2.1.3, all projects were closed and when I tried to open, it complains about not finding the .project file when in fact it is still there.. It is seriously messed up.

I wonder how long it is going to take for me to fix this.. Just a note to warn you people, just be careful and know what you are doing before doing this kind of thing…

UPDATE: It didn’t take that long to fix the workspace in 2.1.3. This is what I did: First, I deleted all the projects from workspace (just the projects, not the contents). Then I went through all the non-binary projects and manually imported each of them. After that, I imported all the required binary projects. That was it!