View source for FAQ Is Eclipse 3.0 going to break all of my old plug-ins?

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No. Many rumors and discussions circulated during the development of Eclipse 3.0
about how compatible it would be with plug-ins written from Eclipse 2.1 or
earlier.  Clearly, in the large community of Eclipse plug-in writers, many
would be greatly inconvenienced by any breaking changes to existing
API.  On the other hand, rigidly maintaining API across all releases can
be a great barrier to ongoing innovation in the platform.  Eventually,
a balance was struck that allowed for some well-justified breaking changes,
while also providing a compatibility story to allow old plug-ins to continue
running on Eclipse 3.0. What does this mean if you have written
plug-ins targeting older versions of the platform?




If you do not want to take advantage of new capabilities in Eclipse 3.0,
you don&#146;t need to do anything.  The platform guarantees 99 percent binary
compatibility with older versions of Eclipse.  Thus, most old
plug-ins that  used only legal API in previous releases will continue working
when installed in Eclipse 3.0. If you find cases in which  this is not true,
you are encouraged to enter bug reports so that the compatibility
support can be fixed.




So far it sounds too easy, right?  Well, as the saying goes, &#147;nothing ventured,
nothing gained.&#148;  If you do
want to take advantage of new Eclipse 3.0 API, you will need
to do some work to port your plug-in to 3.0.  In most cases, the amount
of work required is minimal, and the Eclipse plug-in development tools
provide utilities for automatically migrating your plug-in manifest file
for 3.0.  All  the required migration is carefully described in the <i>Eclipse
3.0 Porting Guide</i>, found in the <i>Platform Plug-in Developer&#146;s Guide</i> in the
Eclipse help system. If you find that your old code is not compiling or running
when being developed against Eclipse 3.0, consult the guide to see what
changes might have affected you.






== See Also: ==


[[FAQ_How_do_I_prevent_my_plug-in_from_being_broken_when_I_update_Eclipse%3F]]