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[eclipse-dev] Ant build submission -- down leveling plugins versions after API freeze


I don't want to start a flame war ... well, I don't really care :) and may even I do because things like this upset me so much.

It seems to me there's been several cases (already) of these new tools overriding plain 'ol common sense and if the tools do not allow you to use common sense (or, even encourage you to use your own judgement), then there's a flaw in your tools!

I have no idea why it was so important to fix this small error in versioning this late, which to me is equivalent to an API change - and, honestly, I hope someone tells me why it is so beneficial in comparison to the great costs:

By "back leveling" a much used plugin such as org.eclipse.ant.core not only broke us in WTP (requiring several hours of "recovery time" ... several people independently discovering it , spending 30 - 60 minutes figuring out what was wrong, l... a day or two of  failed builds because we hadn't  yet reacted to the breaking back leveling, so our builds would break immediately, and then people had to wait around or figure out what to do instead of that they had planned to do since there was no new build, and then finally 15 minutes for someone to finally fix. So ... let's be conservative, and say this impacts only 10 to 30 other projects (and, could be in the hundreds, in my company alone!)  ...  each losing several hours of real time and a one or two days of elapsed time due to failed builds. Even with my lack of financial knowledge and fumbling math skills I can tell the $10,000 to $50,000 dollars this cost (minimum) must mean it was a wonderfully important fix and I can't wait to hear the explanation of why is is worth all our companies spending so much money to recover from this later breaking change. It's very exciting to hear of these grand fixes which we only narrowly missed.

But, after I get some sleep, I'll probably forget the excitement simply recommend you  revert your decision and do the right, common sense thing and never back level version numbers after API freeze.  Is that not obvious?

Oh, and I really do not like flame wars, but am always open to constructive criticism or just plain 'ol education if I am the one missing the obvious.







----- Forwarded by David M Williams/Raleigh/IBM on 05/12/2008 03:24 AM -----
From: Michael Rennie <Michael_Rennie@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: platform-releng-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Date: 05/09/2008 05:08 PM
Subject: [platform-releng-dev] Ant build submission





Ant will contribute the following fixes:

+ Bug 231305. external tools bundle version not correct (FIXED)

The following projects have changed:
org.eclipse.ant.core
org.eclipse.ui.externaltools

Michael Rennie
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