Re: [eclipse-dev] Eclipse, Xerces, and 1.4 VMs

[Michael Y Kwong <mkwong@xxxxxxxxxx>]

While I understand Bob's desire to get everyone to move as quickly as
possible, realistically things take time to move.  I'm glad to see the
component teams taking API compatibility seriously and only break things
when necessary and after careful consideration.

A thought that does come to mind: how can the fact that xerces is going
away and replaced by java XML standard APIs be communicated effectively to
the consumers of the Eclipse API?  I have a feeling this might not be
obvious to people who don't subscribe to the eclipse-dev mailing list, even
if this is really a logical step with the XML APIs having been standardized
...

Mike K.

To: eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [eclipse-dev] Eclipse, Xerces, and 1.4 VMs
From: Jeff McAffer <Jeff_McAffer@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2003 21:26:18 -0400
Reply-To: eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx

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Bob,

While we are considering/doing a number of significant changes for 3.0, I
think you will find that *massive* effort has gone into minimizing and in
fact eliminating API breakage.  I know the UI guys have been agonizing
over this and the Equinox team spent much of the summer building a binary
compatible backward compatibility layer that now basically enables all of
Eclipse and more to run on a completely different runtime with NO changes.

In short, we take breaking API very seriously.  Removing Xerces lives in
the gray area of API.  While we don't make any particular claims, removing
it would certainly cause some plugins to stop working.  Thus our caution.

Jeff





"Bob Foster" <bob@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: eclipse-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx
10/09/2003 09:00 PM
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        To:     <eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
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        Subject:        Re: [eclipse-dev] Eclipse, Xerces, and 1.4 VMs



Of course, it's not essential that the xerces plugin be removed for
Eclipse, itself, to stop using it. I was just thinking that the
foot-dragging would come to an abrupt halt if it were removed.

If you are thinking of consumers outside Eclipse itself, my gosh,
everything else in the API seems to be fair game in 3.0. Why fuss about
xerces?

Bob
----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Wilson
To: eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx ; eclipse-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2003 6:05 PM
Subject: Re: [eclipse-dev] Eclipse, Xerces, and 1.4 VMs


DJ was just being cautious. Since we haven't got a good understanding of
how much of a dependency the consumers of the SDK have on Xerces, we
didn't want to over state the situation.

McQ.




"Bob Foster" <bob@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: eclipse-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx
09/10/03 18:47
Please respond to eclipse-dev

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        Subject:        Re: [eclipse-dev] Eclipse, Xerces, and 1.4 VMs



From: "DJ Houghton" <DJ_Houghton@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Of course you ask, are we removing the org.apache.xerces plug-in from
the
> SDK distribution? We are currently investigating this but are not sure
if
> that is possible.

Why not?

Bob Foster
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