udig projects behaving bad (again?)

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Hi all, we have some serious problems (again) with the projects/map handling.

This time at least I was able to do some serious testing.

It all starts with downloading the natrual earth data [0] and in
particular the "Natural Earth quick start kit" [1], which is nicely
supplied with an Arcgis project file and a QGis project file to open
and be happy with at once.
So I thought it would be nice to have also a uDig project to put
there, so people could be happy with uDig also.

Well, right now this doesn't seem to be possible. uDig projects are
not portable, not relative, not...

What I did was downloading the starter kit, unzip it in a parent
folder (Natural_Earth_quick_start) and finding the following folders
and files:

10m_cultural (data folder)
110m_cultural (data folder)
50m_raster (data folder)
10m_physical (data folder)
110m_physical (data folder)
Natural_Earth_quick_start_for_QGIS.qgs (QGis project)
Natural_Earth_quick_start_for_ArcMap.mxd (Arcgis project)

So I loaded all the data in different maps (one per folder) and
created in the same folder a uDig project with the maps in it:

Natural_Earth_quick_start.udig

I then removed everything from my workspace and restarted uDig "clean"
with the idea to check if the project reloads even if I change some
parent path (to make sure it is relative).

Alright, here my findings:

• I can't reload the project. When I try, I get a pile of "unable to load map"
• I can load the single maps (*.umap), that one works
• if I change the parent folder to Natural_Earth_quick_start2, even
  the maps do not load, or better they load but no data is available
  because they refer to the old paths

The result is that the uDig projects are not portable at all, i.e. we
are not able to share data styled and organised through a uDig project
with colleagues.

I am sorry but I have no time at all to look into this, which also
enters the EMF part (and that one makes me cry everytime I get into
it), since I am all in pushing the spatial toolbox for uDig at the
time.

The problem should be fixes once for all, but I know it is not a small
one and so I guess no one will have resources to work on it. Just let
me say that this in my opinion is a blocker for many users.

For the case someone is so mad to get his hands dirty and beat the
beast (and be our hero), I attach my uDig project, which contains my
paths and may help to debug/fix. Just drop the project into the
natural earth starter kit folder.

[0] http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/
[1] http://kelso.it/x/nequickstart