Bruce,

I pondered this topic over the weekend. I don't think I have enough
information right now to arrive at a better solution. I honestly
thought until Wednesday that the incubator was working well. I
understand that things look different from the inside.

Ray said last week that the new direction was going to be developing
widgets in GWT trunk or in separate projects. I assume that means
there will be throw-away projects for new widgets or groups of widgets
that will last until the code is incorporated into GWT trunk. On the
pro side, that would mean you're not bound to long term backwards
compatibility or supporting the dead-ends that hang around in the
incubator but are still used by a few people. But if the pace of new
development is fast enough, I could see it turning into a game of
whack-a-mole with new projects popping up and disappearing rapidly. I
think one of the advantages of having a single incubator project is
that users can build one project and get access to all of those
experimental widgets at once.


On a side note, a couple of other people have discovered the
StyleInjector change:

http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit-incubator/issues/detail?id=306
http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit-incubator/wiki/MakingIncubatorBetter

I'm not sure what to tell them at this point. I think at the very
least the wiki needs to be clarified.

- Isaac


On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Bruce Johnson <br...@google.com> wrote:
> We've been a little ambivalent about how well the incubator is working --
> it's taken a lot longer to things to move into trunk than we ever guessed it
> would, usually for pretty good reasons. So, we need to find a different way
> of building up a pipeline, and that's a somewhat unsolved problem as yet. If
> anyone has ideas, let 'em rip.
>
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 2:21 PM, Ray Ryan <rj...@google.com> wrote:
>>
>> If you're after guarantees I guess that would be 1686, the one that the
>> 1.7 jar was cut from (gwt-incubator-july-14-2009.jar). Looking at the svn
>> history, nothing has actually changed in the code from that one to the
>> removal of StyleInjector. It's all wiki edits and such since then.
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 8:46 AM, jay <jay.gin...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> So...as of right now, what is the *last* version of gwt-incubator that
>>> is guaranteed to work with GWT 1.7? Is it safe to assume that it is
>>> the version immediately prior to the removal of StyleInjector?
>>>
>>> thanks,
>>>
>>> jay
>>>
>>> On Sep 10, 8:28 am, Isaac Truett <itru...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > [oops - +gwtc]
>>> >
>>> > Hi, Ray,
>>> >
>>> > I appreciate the drive to move forward and I applaud jumping on
>>> > opportunities to remove redundant code.
>>> >
>>> > The reason this policy was important, to me at least, is that it
>>> > provided a baseline to work against. The code in the incubator can be
>>> > very useful (I use PagingScrollTable extensively and used DatePicker
>>> > from incubator before it graduated) but it's also risky because the
>>> > code is still experimental and subject to change. The assurance that
>>> > those changes would be compatible with a packaged and released GWT
>>> > build (even just a milestone) meant that I could build incubator from
>>> > trunk and pick up the latest features and bugfixes as long as my
>>> > project tracked the latest GWT build. Because of the GWT policies on
>>> > deprecation and backwards compatibility, this has been fairly easy in
>>> > practice. As it stands now, incubator will not compile except against
>>> > GWT trunk, which is also notoriously unstable (it wasn't building as
>>> > recently as last night, which I see was corrected this morning). This
>>> > presents a much higher risk for those of us using incubator code.
>>> >
>>> > It also becomes harder to work on the incubator itself when it has to
>>> > compile against GWT trunk. I wanted to look into issue #267 last night
>>> > and I was stymied by GWT trunk not being in a buildable state. Not an
>>> > insurmountable obstacle, but one that seems unnecessary to me.
>>> >
>>> > - Isaac
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Ray Ryan <rj...@google.com> wrote:
>>> > > Hey, Isaac.
>>> > > That policy has proven very difficult to live with. (And to tell you
>>> > > the
>>> > > truth I forgot about it.)
>>> > > The reasoning here was that we have released incubator jars that work
>>> > > with
>>> > > 1.7 and no plans to issue further ones before 2.0 MS1 lands. Should
>>> > > it prove
>>> > > necessary to go back and do so we can go back and branch.
>>> > > In the meantime, we were faced bugs due to FastTree in particular
>>> > > being tied
>>> > > to the old StyleInjector while new development was moving to the
>>> > > version in
>>> > > GWT.  We saw the opportunity to delete redundant code and took it.
>>> > > Is this going to cause problems for anyone?
>>> > > rjrjr
>>> >
>>> > > On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Isaac Truett <itru...@gmail.com>
>>> > > wrote:
>>> >
>>> > >> Last year, Emily stated that it would compile against the "latest
>>> > >> gwt-milestone and gwt-trunk". There hasn't been a 2.0 milestone that
>>> > >> I've seen, so under the policy from last year StyleInjector should
>>> > >> not
>>> > >> have been removed in revisions 1712-1715.
>>> >
>>> > >> So, what's the current policy for incubator trunk compatibility?
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> >
>

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