RE: [eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] CSS and declarative UI round up

[Kevin McGuire <Kevin_McGuire@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Mike,

Specific to the CSS discussion, I don't see any backwards compatibility
issue.  The CSS just exposes the set of things you can already do
with SWT.  Its possible we may need to add a very small amount of
API to SWT to support CSS but it can almost certainly be done without breaking
backwards compatibility.

On the larger front, I see there's a
parallel thread from Doug Schaefer.

My comment was that backwards compatibility
is an implied contract, and while all contracts can be renegotiated, you
better have something valuable to negotiate with.  :) 

In the end there was no concensus with
opinions but there was a general sense that we needed to proceed optimistically.
 We can't just ignore the issue, but then you need to loosen the handcuffs
a bit to make exploration a worthwhile endeavour. The reality will likely
lie somewhere between the extremes, where we could sell on some small breakage
(e.g. rarely used or APIs previoulsy deprecated could be dropped), some
compatibility layers, some new capabilities only available by moving to
several new APIs, ...

Kevin

"Mike Milinkovich" <mike.milinkovich@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: eclipse-incubator-e4-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx

06/24/2008 02:50 PM

Please respond to
mike.milinkovich@xxxxxxxxxxx; Please respond to
E4 developer list <eclipse-incubator-e4-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>

To	"'E4 developer list'" <eclipse-incubator-e4-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
cc
Subject	RE: [eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] CSS and declarative UI round up

I am curious if there
is a consensus around this point of backwards compatibility. I understand
that not achieving backwards compatibility has negative ramifications for
existing adopters. But applying the straitjacket too tightly could mean
that little to no innovation can occur, which has even larger negative
ramifications in the long term.
 
Is there a consensus one
way or another from the E4 team? I’ve scanned the E4 Summit materials
and did not see any explicit conclusion on this point.
 
I am expecting that this effort will not
undermine the existing platform look & feel that SWT/JFace default
to or break backwards compatibility.

We have a lot of products built on this platform, backwards compatibility
is effectively mandatory. _______________________________________________
eclipse-incubator-e4-dev mailing list
eclipse-incubator-e4-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/eclipse-incubator-e4-dev