changing .classpath file reference

I am working with a huge legacy application which was built using Ant + Eclipse. There exists a .classpath file already with references like this (which im guessing eclipses creates):

<classpathentry kind="var" path="LIB_ROOT/json/json.jar"/>
<classpathentry kind="var" path="LIB_ROOT/apache/commons-logging.jar"/>
<classpathentry kind="src" path="src/"/>
<classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.JRE_CONTAINER"/>

Out of the box this doesnt work in vscode as it has no idea wht LIB_ROOT is.

My thought then is since this is a giant ant project and would be quite an effort to convert to maven (cant do gradle as it's also a java 1.8 project), i could do one of the following:

1. simply create an ant task to generate a new .classpath file, say .classpath_vscode
2. or simply generate a line separated list for each libary, and possibly referecne this file as the list values for settings.json -> java.project.referencedLibraries

For #1, is it possible to tell the java extension to use a different .classpath file? (this way devs can move to vscode, but still also work in eclipse using the original .classpath file.

For #2 - would i be able to reference a separate file as the source for the list?

Thanks

Start by examining the Java extension's handling of the .classpath file and settings.json, especially java.project.referencedLibraries. Compare the requested alternate .classpath and external library-list workflows; done means the supported configuration path is documented or one requested workflow is implemented and verified in VS Code.