I believe this is a
worthy discussion, perhaps also
ultimately for the Platform mailing
list.
I think we should try
very hard to stick to mirroring
certification results. Otherwise we
enter a potential minefield of fairness,
avoiding user confusion, potential
devaluation of certification, weakening
compatibility, etc. This is of course
especially acute as this is the official
starter.
It would be good if
others could weigh in on this. On Slack
it was only myself, Scott, and Ondro
that chimed in at all.
Let me raise
the question from Slack:
https://eclipsefoundationhq.slack.com/archives/C047MCS83FT/p1678788937498749
to the list here:
Should the
Eclipse Starter for Jakarta EE project use
formal compatibility/certification/etc. to
guard use of the UI and underlying
archetypes, for a given combination of
runtime+profile+version?
An alternative
might be to allow someone working on a
particular runtime to “vouch for” the
usefulness of the function at a certain
level if they work on the PR.
E.g. with Open
Liberty close to EE 10 compliance, I
wouldn’t expect Reza or one of the starter
project committers to go out of their way
to enable this, but if I personally (as an
Open Liberty committer) were to do the
work to enable this then maybe my PR
should be merged?
Some more
thoughts:
Maybe there
could be an asterisk (*) or warning/caveat
about a runtime in such a
not-yet-certified state?
If this is
going to lead to debates about what should
vs. shouldn’t be allowed though then
perhaps it wouldn’t be worth it. A nice
thing about keying off formal
certification is that we’ve already agreed
to what counts as compatible.
I do see some
potential for user confusion if
uncertified runtimes are enabled via the
starter.
But the
counterargument is to consider the case
that we’re very far along on the way to
certify against EE 10, we’ve got a lot of
useful function and this convenient
starter… let users take advantage of it.
They don’t care that we’re disputing three
TCK test methods at this point.
And assuming
the runtime is in some kind of beta /
early release then presumably there’s
going to be a suitable “warning” implicit
in the non-final version of the particular
runtime.
Anyway, I
could argue more with myself but let me
send this out for discussion first.
Scott Kurz