[news.eclipse.platform] Re: No solution found because the problem in /tm

["John J. Barton" <johnjbarton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Eric Rizzo wrote:
> On 12/11/2008 2:54 PM, John J Barton wrote:
...
I'll try your practical solutions, but I want to discuss the philosophy:

> > I do *not* want to do this. It's not practical for me or my users. What
> > is practical is what we already do: "use ecilpse jee 3.4.0".

Of course I meant "3.4.x", see below.

> That is fine as a user instruction, but is not enough for the platform 
> (OSGi) to go on. Remember that, although Eclipse has coordinated 
> releases (named things like Europa, Ganymede, Galileo) and the EPP 
> project produces convenient packages that include sets of plugins from 
> those coordinated releases, each plugin can evolve independently AND a 
> user is free to update or install new plugins at any time. Therefore it 
> is impossible to define "Eclipse JEE 3.4.0" unless you spell out what 
> versions of what features and plugins that includes. Plus, that is a 
> very specific case, not one that most plugins or Eclipse-based products 
> want because it would be VERY restrictive. For example, I can't use the 
> SR2 (Ganymede 3.4.2, if you want to call it that) with your plugins? 
> Really? There's no API changes allowed in an increment release (3.4.x) 
> so there should not be such a restriction in most cases. See what I mean 
> by the balance between guaranteed compatibility and overly restrictive?
I understand the issues, but I still claim that Eclipse has gotten this 
wrong.

You say "There's no API changes allowed in an increment release 
(3.4.x)".  That is exactly the kind of information I rely on when I tell 
uses "this plugin works with 3.4". So when I build my plugin I should 
say "test with 3.4" and when it ships and users install the answer 
should be "success" or "requires 3.4". This is not impossible or 
difficult, it's what people do all of the time.

It's great that eclipse *allows* much finer detail, but it needs to get 
the basic function working first. It's great that it supports all kinds 
of configs, but it should get the basic IDE configs that thousands of 
developers rely on working first. And it should not matter what I put in 
to the dev API, the end user should always get some information that 
helps them or helps the developer move forward. I like seeing debug 
output from a tool, but not as the primary UI from a tool for end users.

Sorry I am so negative on this but its very frustrating to work on a 
plugin and then find users can't install it.

jjb