David,
My
$.02…
I
vote that we require and support only version of Eclipse 3.4… I say
this since there will be a significant cost of testing earlier Eclipse
versions; and given that Eclipse is in an Open Source tool, I do not see a
major issue in someone upgrading to the GA / COSMOS-blessed version of Eclipse
(other than perhaps dev standards or guidelines at a given organization).
An
even BIGGER issue I see is one with Users (as opposed to Developers)…. This
is in reference to the runtimes for the various / sundry software i.e. Tomcat /
plug-ins / Java. There, the picture is not so simple since sometimes products
REQUIRE a certain version of the Tomcat and/or Java.
In
one of my recent adoption exercises, I had no choice but to install a totally
separate Tomcat JUST for COSMOS, since the product was using an earlier
version.
That
said, if we DO decide to support additional versions of Eclipse / Tomcat /
Java, what metrics do we use to decide how far back do we go in terms of
versions? This also has a non-trivial QA impact, since they will have to
test the all permutations / combinations of the options. Also, at least
today, the errors that we see are very cryptic in case of incorrect ancillary
software…
The
easiest / cheapest solution I see is to clearly (and narrowly) define the
versions of ALL software we will work with; but a pushback we may get from some
people is that we are too restrictive…
Thanks,
Jimmy Mohsin
Cell +1-609-635-1703
From:
cosmos-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:cosmos-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of David Whiteman
Sent: Friday, May 02, 2008 4:31 PM
To: cosmos-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [cosmos-dev] Eclipse version support question
Hello all,
A question came
up as to whether COSMOS should require the use of Eclipse 3.4 for its
Eclipse-based components, or if we should allow the use of an earlier version
such as 3.3. A separate question is whether we support earlier versions;
this will make sense when you read on.
In our plugin
prerequisites, you can indicate a minimum version for required bundles, and by
default Eclipse fills in whatever the current version of the bundle is in your
environment. We had an internal adopter attempt to install the toolkit
using Eclipse 3.3, and the prereq minimum versions that were auto filled-in
prevented him from doing so. The question is whether we change those
version numbers to be equal to the 3.3 version strings, remove the version
numbers entirely, or simply require the 3.4 versions to be used. Even
though this is related to the toolkit, this will have to be a project wide
decision, as we don't want different components supporting different versions
of Eclipse.
Is anyone aware
of a requirement by an adopter to use our tools with Eclipse 3.3? Even if
not, should we remove the bundle prereq enforcement, and simply say "buyer
beware" to those who try using a pre-3.4 installation of Eclipse?
Thanks,
David
---
David Whiteman | Tivoli Autonomic Computing
Eclipse COSMOS project committer | http://www.eclipse.org/cosmos/
david_whiteman@xxxxxxxxxx | 919-254-8224 | T/L 444-8224