On 02/12/2016 02:24 PM, Christian
Pontesegger wrote:
Hi,
Hi,
I am wondering how other projects handle different target
platforms for their projects. If you are not part of the release
train, users might install your plugins into a wide range of
eclipse installations ranging from 3.x versions up to the newest
neon builds. While it is easy to set a minimum target platform,
how do you deal with optional features that only exist in newer
versions of eclipse.
[...]
I would love to hear how other projects handle these problems.
I believe at some point, users must understand that if they want
better things, they'll have to update their software. Most
contributors cannot spend enough energy/time in supporting multiple
older versions of the IDE, and innovating at the same time.
Imagine someone going to ask Microsoft to have Office 2015 supported
on Windows 98, do you think Microsoft would just say yet? It's
definitely not the direction of innovation.
So IMO, the best strategy for the community as a whole (both
contributors and users) is to really support the best target
version, for example Mars, and only this one, If you only use
features or APIs that were in previous versions, then having more
open dependency range working (usual semantic versioning works well
for that) and testing against older versions is a nice to have, but
if you use a new feature API, then telling users who want this
feature that they also have to update their IDE makes sense. Those
who want to stick with older IDE can stick with older version of
your plugins.
I would discourage strongly any mechanism that would show
ClassNotFoundException to users. The whole design of versioning in
OSGi was made to prevent from this error; using alternative
strategies to reintroduce it is a regression. Users who face an
exception just believe that the software they're using sucks, and do
not necessarily imagine that they just have to update their IDE.
However, if this is a direction you really want to take, then you
can imagine catching such exceptions when you can anticipate them
and show a better "Please update your IDE to enable this feature"
instead of an error.