[wtp-dev] Tweaking our access rules "from above"

[David M Williams <david_williams@xxxxxxxxxx>]

As I've implied, I've been doing some
work to improve our use of Access Rule violation reporting. 

It has been in the builds this week,
but I've improved some of the summary reporting, which should 
start to show up later tonight (hopefully
"today" for most of you reading this :) 

And, I've written up the general issue
and procedures in our wiki. 

http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/WTP:_Tweaking_Access_Rules

Basically, the ability to tweak the
dev. env. has been present for a long time ... I think I've written 
about that before, but can't find it
... so, probably just dreamt it. Not sure exactly, why others haven't 
used this ... but, maybe 

there hasn't been much motivation to
do so, since the PDE batch builds we do would not 
reflect any custom tweaking we did in
the IDE. 

So, now that PDE batch build part has
been fixed. 

If you "drill down" In this
weeks builds, you can see we are reporting 662 warnings, in 21 of our 
code plugins. So, we need to fix these,
just as much, or more, than the other 224 compiler warnings
we have. (and .. thanks to those that
have reduced those compiler warnings from the 500 compiler warnings we
were
having lately ... not sure who's responsible
... but you get one clown-nose-free build break for doing so ;) 

There's actually access violations in
one plugin ... which I think will be fixed, incidentally,  once we
improve our 
orbit bundle use. 

To some extent, these access warnings
will correspond to some of our API Scan violation reports ... so, there
may 
be bugs opened for many cases already,
either against our own code, or for others to provide API. 

The one thing the API Scan violation
reports won't ever tell us, is the use of inlined constants, so, that may

be new-news for some ... and, those
are both "dangerous" violations precisely because they are inlined,

and usually easy to fix. So, let's attack
those for 2.0 release ... please!

Another immediate action is that plugin/component
owners should "fix up" their own customized access rules, as
documented 
in http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/WTP:_Tweaking_Access_Rules
so that way we can all turn on 
discouraged use warnings in our development
environments again ... and not see the infamous Christmas Tree of 
50000 warnings light up our Display's.


A longer term action (over the next
few weeks) ... if your plugin does not show up as having any access violations,

and does not show up in our API Violation
scans ... then you should make sure you use a WIDE plugin version pre-req

pattern in your manifest.mf files. (You'll
recall, in the past we often used conservative ranges, since we didn't
know 
for sure). 

So ... I'm sure this note is terse ..
for as long as it is ... please raise any questions, concerns, or problems
here. 

Thanks all.