Re: Plugin Compatibility

On 8/23/2016 9:50 AM, David Gibbs wrote:

On 8/23/2016 8:33 AM, Vernon Hamberg wrote:

So far as I know, anyone writing plugins for RDi has to take into
account the version of Eclipse and maybe of Java and finally of the
development kit for RDi - you can't rely on anything working
completely between releases.

Actually, this was only a big factor when they made the jump from RDi
7.1 to RDi 7.5. That's when the RSE framework was open sourced and
refactored.

With a few exceptions, plug-in's written for RDi 7.5 have remained
compatible with subsequent versions of RDi.

This is true when moving from a lower RDi version to a higher version.
OP went the other way.

When I look at the dependencies in my plug-in, I have com.ibm.lpex
(4.2.5). The properties of that dependency show that RDi selected
com.ibm.lpex (4.4.1.v20160226_1353) as the matching .jar file. It seems
a little surprising that it didn't match to the older jar file but my
plug-in is seriously vanilla. Maybe the matching algorithm is smart
enough to realise that the functionality I'm using is identical between
the earliest and latest jar files.

Looking in C:\ibm\shared\features, I see several different Lpex jar files:
4.2.5
4.2.6
4.4.0
4.4.1

My plug-in was written long ago, which is probably why it depends on
4.2.5 but has matched to the jar file at 4.4.1. But I'd expect that a
new plug-in would depend on 4.4.1 (and match to the same jar file). It
might be interesting to compare MANIFEST.MF from my old plug-in vs the
newer one:

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Bundle-ManifestVersion: 2
Bundle-Name: Lpexextensions
Bundle-SymbolicName: com.kc2hiz.lpexextensions;singleton:=true
Bundle-Version: 1.0.4.qualifier
Bundle-ClassPath: com.kc2hiz.lpexextensions
Bundle-Activator: com.kc2hiz.lpexextensions.Activator
Bundle-Vendor: KC2HIZ
Require-Bundle: org.eclipse.ui,
org.eclipse.core.runtime,
com.ibm.lpex;bundle-version="4.2.5",
org.eclipse.ui,
org.eclipse.core.runtime
Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment: JavaSE-1.8
Bundle-ActivationPolicy: lazy
Export-Package: com.kc2hiz.lpexextensions