[eclipse-dev] Ant build submission -- down leveling plugins versions aft

[David M Williams <david_williams@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't want to start a flame war ...
well, I don't really care :) and may even I do because things like this
upset me so much. 

It seems to me there's been several
cases (already) of these new tools overriding plain 'ol common sense and
if the tools do not allow you to use common sense (or, even encourage you
to use your own judgement), then there's a flaw in your tools! 

I have no idea why it was so important
to fix this small error in versioning this late, which to me is equivalent
to an API change - and, honestly, I hope someone tells me why it is so
beneficial in comparison to the great costs: 

By "back leveling" a much
used plugin such as org.eclipse.ant.core not only broke us in WTP (requiring
several hours of "recovery time" ... several people independently
discovering it , spending 30 - 60 minutes figuring out what was wrong,
l... a day or two of  failed builds because we hadn't  yet reacted
to the breaking back leveling, so our builds would break immediately, and
then people had to wait around or figure out what to do instead of that
they had planned to do since there was no new build, and then finally 15
minutes for someone to finally fix. So ... let's be conservative, and say
this impacts only 10 to 30 other projects (and, could be in the hundreds,
in my company alone!)  ...  each losing several hours of real
time and a one or two days of elapsed time due to failed builds. Even with
my lack of financial knowledge and fumbling math skills I can tell the
$10,000 to $50,000 dollars this cost (minimum) must mean it was a wonderfully
important fix and I can't wait to hear the explanation of why is is worth
all our companies spending so much money to recover from this later breaking
change. It's very exciting to hear of these grand fixes which we only narrowly
missed. 

But, after I get some sleep, I'll probably
forget the excitement simply recommend you  revert your decision and
do the right, common sense thing and never back level version numbers after
API freeze.  Is that not obvious? 

Oh, and I really do not like flame wars,
but am always open to constructive criticism or just plain 'ol education
if I am the one missing the obvious. 







----- Forwarded by David
M Williams/Raleigh/IBM on 05/12/2008 03:24 AM -----

From:	Michael Rennie <Michael_Rennie@xxxxxxxxxx>
To:	platform-releng-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Date:	05/09/2008 05:08 PM
Subject:	[platform-releng-dev] Ant build submission

---

Ant will contribute the following fixes:

+ Bug 231305. external tools bundle version not correct (FIXED)

The following projects have changed:
org.eclipse.ant.core
org.eclipse.ui.externaltools

Michael Rennie _______________________________________________
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