This Bugzilla instance is a read-only archive of historic NetBeans bug reports. To report a bug in NetBeans please follow the project's instructions for reporting issues.

Bug 234327

Summary:	Review/improve project metafile backward compatibility between different versions of the IDE
Product:	java	Reporter:	Petr Somol <psomol>
Component:	Project	Assignee:	Tomas Zezula <tzezula>
Status:	NEW ---
Severity:	normal	CC:	johnjullion, psomol
Priority:	P2
Version:	7.4
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Windows 7
Issue Type:	ENHANCEMENT	Exception Reporter:

Description Petr Somol 2013-08-13 12:47:02 UTC

Based on discussion with JavaFX team on 12 AUG 13 I quote:

Projects can't be shared between different versions of the IDE - build-impl.xml gets changed in backwards-incompatible ways. Incompatible changes in build-impl.xml between releases made it very hard to share projects when part of the team was using dev builds and part was using a stable build.

This was probably one of the biggest issues we encountered with large-team development.

-----------------
PS: I am filing this issue as it is emphasized by JavaFX people as an important NetBeans inconvenience from their point of view. I am not sure whether the problem relates to build-impl.xml or jfx-impl.xml or both.

It would help though to get more details about what exactly are the concrete incompatibilities encountered.

But I should say right away that changes in buildscripts across various NetBeans versions are to some point inevitable - we realize significant part of build functionality inside the build scripts to enable compilation outside NB; at the same time we need to extend the scripts to support new functionality, to fix bugs, or to accomodate changes in JDK etc. Generally we aim at making the changes as compatible as possible - bigger incompatible changes are generally considered only in cases of serious need. Anyway, all this deserves closer look and a review of what can or can not be done to improve matters.