[hyades-dev] raserver versioning

[Kim Coleman <kcoleman@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Before I file a feature request about this, I thought I should ask whether 
there's already a solution available that I just haven't stumbled across:

1. How does a user of RAServer determine what version it is?

2. How does a client dependent on RAServer determine what version it is 
talking to?

I am speaking of versioning here in the sense of 3.0 vs. 3.0.1 vs. 3.1, 
etc. As a provider of software on top of the platform, I need to be able 
to tell my customers (or have my client software verify) what version of 
RAServer they should be running. Think of it as a support issue.

1. It does not appear that RAServer responds to something like -version. 
Is there a way ask this question from the command line? In fact, the only 
way I could see to determine what version is on disk was looking at the 
version attribute in the serviceconfig.xml. This seems a little obscure.

2. As a plugin provider, it would be useful to determine whether or not 
the RAServer I'm talking to is the version I'm compatible with. We had an 
incident recently where someone inadvertently ended up using a Hyades 3.0 
based workbench with a pre-3.0 RAServer. 3.0 is backward compatible, so 
the old stuff all still worked, but of course anything dependent on new 
functionality (like the agent extensions) did not. This was quite 
mystifying for the user. We could have headed off the confusion by 
catching this incompatibility during profiling launch and complaining to 
the user.

Is there already a way to detect this in the workbench, using the current 
(3.0(.1)) interfaces?

Thanks.

-Kim

Kim Coleman
PurifyPlus Development
IBM Rational Software, Cupertino, CA
kcoleman@xxxxxxxxxx