| [eclipse-pmc] Migrating to Jetty 8, Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2 |
We have been making progress in migrating to Jetty 8 in bug https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=309529
There is an issue of compatibility that I want to bring to the Eclipse PMC's attention. In moving to Servlet 3.0 we will need to upgrade the javax.servlet bundle we ship in the Eclipse SDK to version 3.0. This bundle (from orbit) currently exports the javax.servlet packages at package version 3.0. While this seem to make sense on the surface it does not make sense from a binary compatibility story since Servlet 3.0 specification is binary compatible with the Servlet 2.5 specification. It is possible that the community has client application bundles that use the serlvet/jsp support in Equinox. If they are following the best practice for importing the javax.servlet packages then they should be using an import package range like "[2.5, 3.0)". Such a client application bundle will get burned by our move to servlet 3.0 and would have to update their own bundles to allow for the import of the 3.0 javax.servlet packages.
The discussion in going on in bug https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=360245. I plan to discuss with the glassfish team to figure out why the exported the package at versoin 3.0 instead something that indicates the correct evolution of the package (e.g. 2.6). My assumption is that they will not be changing to a package version less than 3.0 for the javax.serlvet 3 bundle. So do we view this as an acceptable breaking change for the Juno release? The impact really depends on how many client bundles we have that are using Import-Package with the best practice range for client application bundles.
Tom