[platform-core-dev] new local history - early adopters wanted

[Rafael Chaves <Rafael_Chaves@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Today's integration build contains a new implementation for the resource
local history. The new implementation is intended to be simpler/smaller
than the existing one (so it is easier to maintain), and hopefully faster.

The new implementation is not enabled by default. To use it, the following
system property has to be specified when running Eclipse (*every* time you
do it):

-Dorg.eclipse.core.resources.newHistory=true

The following property should be specified for the first time (there is no
harm if you always do it) you run using the new implementation, in order
for your existing local history to be converted to the new format:

-Dorg.eclipse.core.resources.convertHistory=true

Otherwise the existing history will be ignored.

If everything goes ok during the conversion, an INFO entry will be logged
describing that it completed successfully, and the existing local history
index file will be backed up. If a failure occurs, an error will be logged
(due to a mistake merging the new code from a branch, the actual messages
will be missing in this build, but it is easy to figure out the meaning of
the log entries by looking at the message key that appears). If there was
no existing history, no messages will be logged.

An easy way to have the properties always specified is by adding these two
lines to <eclipse>/configuration/config.ini:

org.eclipse.core.resources.newHistory = true
org.eclipse.core.resources.convertHistory = true

We expect to have the existing implementation completely replaced by the
new one in the coming weeks. But we are looking for as many early users for
the new implementation as we can get. Feedback in the form of comments in
this list and preferrably bug reports against Platform/Resources are most
welcome.

For more info on this work, see:

http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-core-home/documents/history_store.html

Thanks,

The Platform/Core team