[eclipse-dev] Planning Meeting Post-Notes, Nov 19, 2008

[John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

A request has been made to move org.eclipse.compare
and org.eclipse.team.* into a separate feature. We are currently evaluating
the benefit of this. Please post comments in the following bug:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=255177

Preferences discussion topic:

The old deprecated org.eclipse.core.runtime.Preferences
API had two scopes (instance and default). The new preference API (IEclipsePreferences/IPreferencesService)
has an open-ended set of scopes (with instance/default/configuration/project
scopes out of the box). The question arose for people fixing their deprecated
references to Preferences what the correct new coding pattern should be.
To obtain exactly the old behaviour when getting a preference requires
two method calls on the new API (one against instance scope, and another
against default scope). The summary of the discussion is that clients should
follow the advice in the deprecation comment (use IPreferencesService.getString/getInt/etc).
This is *not* the same as the old behaviour because it consults more scopes,
but for the vast majority of clients this is the right answer. We will
review the deprecation comments to ensure they provide sufficient explanation.

John