Keeping the tree in sync

[DtD]

Our team is using Mercurial for version control (but this should apply to any vcs) and I am running into issues with Windriver/Eclipse's workspace tree management.

It seems even the smallest of change causes the ".metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.resources \" directories to change completely. Which would not be aweful except they are binary files instead of nice XML files. I'm worried about needless merge conflicts coming from these files, but they are what powers the file structure in the project view. It also seems there is no way to properly add existing files to an already-existing project, so asking people to manually update there trees is not an option either.

There are VCS plugins for eclipse, but we already spent a lot of time getting everyone command-line savvy and I'd rather not stray far from what we already know.

How have other teams gotten around this problem? Is there a way to export the project tree as a pretty little XML file? (Like MSVC natively does.)

~David