Re: [m2e-users] locking m2e minimal required eclipse platform version

[Bruno Medeiros <brunojcm@xxxxxxxxx>]

Igor,

I recently wrote here in this list asking just that, a compatibility matrix between m2e and eclipse. It's very confusing to the final user, not always aware of the eclipse platform and m2e roll-out times, to know which version of m2e someone should use on an specific version of Eclipse.

If support one less version of Eclipse per m2e release is going to make things easier to understand, and save your time, I support this change.

If you let me suggest other improvement, having a place where we can get/know the latest m2e extensions given an specific m2e version, it would be awesome. I never know where I can get the latest m2e-subversive, for example, for m2e y.x.

Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate your hard work, but for some people maybe you're doing 99% and this missing 1% (documentation about compatibility between version, which you know almost instantly) make people give up or suffer trying to use m2e.

Regards,

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 3:26 PM, Igor Fedorenko <igor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Some background. Historically, m2e always supported at least one older
release of Eclipse Platform. For example, m2e 1.4 released with Kepler
was also fully supported on Juno. So when Fred offered to release m2e
1.4.1 to provide m2e java 8 support on Kepler, I was not very supportive
to the idea (to put it mildly): extra release will mean extra support
surface for developers and extra confusion to the users, so why do it
when m2e 1.5 works on Kepler? After some rather interestingly worded
discussion, it turned out while m2e 1.5 itself works with Kepler just
fine, downstream m2e consumers, like m2e-wtp and jbosstools, do not
work, or at least it will be rather time consuming to assemble
everything required.

In other words, m2e project policy to support previous Eclipse Platform
version is not very useful in practice and pretty much amounts to wasted
development effort. (again, I wish we could collect actual usage stats,
but alas, Eclipse Foundation does not allow this).

So my proposal is to introduce minimal required Eclipse Platform version
and lock it to the target yearly release. For m2e 1.5 it will be Luna
(3.10 version of org.eclipse.osgi and org.eclipse.jdt bundles). For m2e
1.6 it will be the version(s) of these bundles shipped with Mars, and so
on. This will reduce development load somewhat and will also eliminate
any confusion about m2e and Eclipse Platform version compatibility.

Seems like a good deal to me, but I wonder if other developers and users
see any problems with this proposal?

--
Regards,
Igor
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BrunoJCM