[linuxtools-dev] Supporting nightly updates for previous release

[Jeff Johnston <jjohnstn@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I was briefly discussing this with Andrew, but thought I would pose the 
idea here for comment.

At present, we are building nightly updates from trunk.  For the most 
part, this isn't a problem.  However, when we make any changes that 
require latest versions of underlying plugins (e.g. we use a new 
platform interface or we switch to requiring latest CDT, Mylyn, etc..), 
then nightly updates may no longer apply to the previous release as they 
don't meet prereqs.

I would like to propose that we support multiple versions of a plugin on 
the update site where necessary so that the previous release of Eclipse 
can still acquire nightly updates.

For example, there is a new way of getting a CDT translation unit that 
doesn't violate API annotations and Autotools should use this new API. 
It only exists in CDT 7 which means that I will have to branch Autotools 
into a Galileo maintenance branch once I make the fix in trunk.  If I 
make any fixes to Autotools after that, there is no current mechanism 
for getting them to end-users via the normal nightly update system.

Ideally I would like to have it set up so there is one nightly update 
site that contains latest fixes for either Galileo or Helios, but I 
think it would also be ok to just set up a separate site for Galileo if 
mixing multiple levels of plugins is not worth the effort.

Comments?

-- Jeff J.