[cbi-dev] Feature Version Qualifiers and Dependencies

[Gunnar Wagenknecht <gunnar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings,

I probably never carfully checked, but recently I discovered an 
interesting shortcoming of how Tycho generates feature version 
qualifiers.

It's actually documented here:
https://wiki.eclipse.org/Tycho/Reproducible_Version_Qualifiers#Feature_version_qualifiers 


> Timestamps of included bundles and features and derived from their 
> version qualifiers and any qualifier that cannot be interpreted as 
> timestamp is ignored.

The "cannot be interpreted" part is very interesting. The current 
implementation in Tycho expect the format of qualifiers of all included 
bundles and dependencies to match the one from the qualifier being 
generated, i.e. it only uses the format for parsing specified in the 
configuration (default is yyyMMddHHmm).

As soon as a feature includes something from Orbit or another Eclipse 
project you are pretty much screwed. Chances are high that qualifier 
formats are different.

Details here:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/482086

I'm working on a patch. I'd like to have your input on the variations 
of formats to support. Thus, if you could quickly check and post a 
comment on the bug if your format is not among the "common" formats 
mentioned in the bug.

Thanks!

-Gunnar


--
Gunnar Wagenknecht
gunnar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx