[stellation-res] *Important* Eclipse version question for the gang

["Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Folks:

I'm currently working on finishing the non-CLI-based Stellation
client plugin. I've been looking at what's going on in the R3 stream,
and I need to decide whether to target R2 or R3.

R3 is changing a lot of APIs, and exposing a bunch of really nice new
functionality. But it is relatively unstable - the new APIs are
going to change over time. 

The big differences that I've noticed so far:

- There is a new synch view. Much more of the sync and merge machinery
  is API now, and the new merge stuff is *very* nifty.

- The three-way-merge view is now API.

- There is a very nice in-line diff thing using sidebar shading
  to show changes in a file - we could do *really* cool stuff with the
  new task service and that sidebar shading support.

- The build support is *much* better. We can use Eclipse machinery
  to do a complete build of Stellation, and produce a packaged
  product.

- There is support for scripting actions in Javascript. (And, I
  suspect that that scripting machinery will be easy to hijack for
  other Java-friendly scripting languages like Jython.) This means
  that we can provide triggers in script!

The question that I'm putting forward is this: is it worth jumping over
to the R3 stuff, even though that will make it harder for some users
until R3 stabilizes? Or should we stick with R2, which gives us the
larger user base,  even though some things will have to be omitted for
now, or rewritten when R3 comes out?

If you want to chat about it, I'll be on IRC at Freenode.net #stellation
starting about 9:30 tomorrow morning. If you want to discuss on-list,
please post as soon as you can. I'd like to get a decision on this
quickly. (We've got some demos coming up, and we need to finish some
of this for it, so time is of the essence.)

	-Mark

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