Re: [platform-releng-dev] improved checking for internal references

[Jeff McAffer <Jeff_McAffer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

It would be quite disappointing if parts
of Eclipse was not usable on smaller platforms simply because we were annotating
classes with development time information.  If there are real functional
or other benefits in using non-Foundation classes or constructs (that cannot
be had some other way) then we should go ahead and use 1.5.  I very
much agree with the intention here and want to see the API checking happen
but hope that it will not impeded our ability to run in more environments.

Note that the desire to run on Foundation
is not limited to just the "RCP base" plugins.   We have
scoped it to that to make the problem tractible and so we can see tangible
results.  Many of the optional RCP plugins (and non-platform plugins
such as EMF) may also be interested in running on a reduced class library.
 

Javadoc is looking pretty good at this
point...

Jeff

Steven Wasleski <wasleski@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: platform-releng-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx

02/18/2005 04:50 PM

Please respond to
platform-releng-dev

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Subject	Re: [platform-releng-dev] improved checking for internal references

Philippe wrote on 02/18/2005 04:25:09 PM:

> If this feature request was implemented, our compiler would accept
a
> superset of the Java language, and no longer be compliant.

I thought the answer might be something like this but I thought I should
ask.  You might want to resolve this bug as WONTFIX for this reason.

> One could imagine using Javadoc, and then some tooling to convert
Javadoc
> into annotation (once migrating to 1.5 JRE).
Yes, this would be a reasonable option for much of Eclipse, but because
of bug 80053 (https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=80053),
it is not an option for the RCP until J2ME moves to supporting Java 5.
 I am not sure when or if that will happen.

I was hoping we could choose between Javadoc and Annotation based on which
was best for tooling authoring and enforcement of api specifications.  I
was thinking Annotation would be better because we could leverage more
of the existing JDT environment and api restrictions encoded as Annotations
can enforced in the absence of source code.  However, if you are using
an api, you will probably have the source code available so perhaps the
last point is not as big a deal as I was imagining.

> 
> Olivier wrote on 02/17/2005 05:13:29 PM:
> >
> > As soon as you use a 1.5 constructs (annotations, new for loop,
> > generics, static imports, enums, ....) you need -source 1.5 which
> > requires -target 1.5. So the generated .class file can only run
on a
> > 1.5 VM. If you don't use 1.5 constructs, then you can change
the
> > source level to what you want 1.4 ou less and have a compatible
target
> level.
> >
> 
> If bug 76906 (https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=76906)
were
> implemented, could we get around this problem for annotations?
> 
> Thanks,
> Steve