[platform-vcm-dev] Breaking changes in org.eclipse.team.core

[Jean-Michel_Lemieux@xxxxxxx]

As we head in to the M4 milestone, we have started implementing the changes required to evolve the team API. These changes reflect the post made in this newsgoup a month ago by Kevin McGuire.

These changes will BREAK all team provider plugins. Here is a summary of the changes that have been made:

- The ITeamManager::setProvider/removeProvider method have been removed. Instead, simply add/remove a team nature to the project instead.

- A provider (e.g. RepositoryProvider class) has a smaller minimum API to implement and can opt out of implementing the standard operations such as (get/checkout...) or the file modification validation.

- Using abstract classes instead of interfaces. This way we can provider safe default implementations for certain methods and it allows the API to evolve in the future.

- There is a new method for querying for the type of a provider. The following pattern can be used:
        
RepositoryProvider provider = RepositoryProviderType.getProvider(project);
if(provider.isOfType(id)) {
}

- Events have been removed from team.core. The mechanism was too generic to be useful and we couldn't think of how it was being used by many. We would need some feedback on how others were using this mechanism generically.

- Move/rename/delete hooks are being added to the API.

- The API defined in the StandardOperations class has not been decided on yet. It will be changing soon.

The API will continue to change in the next few weeks but should stabilize soon. We will post any big changes to the mailing list.

Jean-Michel