[tracecompass-dev] Trace Compass Scripting API

[Geneviève Bastien <gbastien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,


Until now, the tracecompass incubator project, which contains add-ons
for Trace Compass, has followed the Trace Compass API, a new update site
was created at each release of Trace Compass to freeze the add-ons for
this version, but it never had any releases, all the incubator plugins
are still at 0.0.1-qualifier. This allowed us to change the
classes/methods at will, without impacting anyone, as those plugins were
not really meant to be extended anyway, unless at your own risk.


But this will have to change, at least for some plugins:


The Trace Compass Scripting feature, from the incubator project, has a
user facing API. Users are going to develop scripts with it, we have a
github with example and utility scripts [1]. We cannot just change
methods from the API without impacting users. So the scripting plugins
will have to have some versioning (no major releases are allowed in
incubator projects, but we can play with minor and patch).


* As in the main Trace Compass, we will have to deprecate a public
method for at least 2 minor releases.

* minor releases will be upgraded only when deprecation occurs

* patch number will be upgraded when new APIs arrive

* The "release" of a new version will be the same as Trace Compass, but
that's not a hard constraint if some ongoing work makes it a week later,
that's fine, it's unofficial releases anyway.

* That means that at the next TC release, we'll release 0.1.0 of the
scripting plugins.

* The EASE API prints a deprecation warnings, which will tell the user to update his/her script.

 [1] https://github.com/tahini/tracecompass-ease-scripting

Any thoughts?

Best regards,
Geneviève