Tycho/Release Notes/0.21

New and Noteworthy

The embedded JDT compiler has been updated to the Luna version which supports Java 8 (bug 430986)

If you use Java 7 or higher, symbolic links in product tar archives are now preserved as links in the archive instead of being inlined (bug 429809)
This is particularly useful for MacOS distributions which create a symbolic link to the launcher binary Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse. Also, it may now be interesting to create symbolic links via root files.
Add support for 256x256 BMPs used for product icons on Windows (bug 433971)

A regression in Tycho 0.20.0 has been fixed: Environment variables were not inherited to forked test processes (bug 431793)
(INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE) In case you have used test-runtime only dependencies in the tycho-surefire-plugin configuration, you may need to replace them with target-platform-configuration/dependency-resolution/extraRequirements instead. See bug 436617 comment 11 for details.

The embedded OSGi runtime used by Tycho during build has been updated to use Equinox and p2 from the Eclipse Luna release (bug 429442). The new Equinox version requires Java 6, so JAVA_HOME now needs to point to Java 6 or later for a Maven/Tycho build.
The target-platform-validation-plugin can now check if a target file contains all transitive dependencies of its content (bug 434238). This may be useful for target files using includeMode="slicer" because it can detect if there may be dependency resolution problems when using the target file in a Tycho build.
The reference documentation has been updated to provide a list of supported PDE build.properties keys