Hi Mike,

Specific to the CSS discussion, I don't see any backwards compatibility 
issue.  The CSS just exposes the set of things you can already do with 
SWT.  Its possible we may need to add a very small amount of API to SWT to 
support CSS but it can almost certainly be done without breaking backwards 
compatibility.

On the larger front, I see there's a parallel thread from Doug Schaefer.

My comment was that backwards compatibility is an implied contract, and 
while all contracts can be renegotiated, you better have something 
valuable to negotiate with.  :) 

In the end there was no concensus with opinions but there was a general 
sense that we needed to proceed optimistically.  We can't just ignore the 
issue, but then you need to loosen the handcuffs a bit to make exploration 
a worthwhile endeavour. The reality will likely lie somewhere between the 
extremes, where we could sell on some small breakage (e.g. rarely used or 
APIs previoulsy deprecated could be dropped), some compatibility layers, 
some new capabilities only available by moving to several new APIs, ...

Kevin





"Mike Milinkovich" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
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RE: [eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] CSS and declarative UI round up






I am curious if there is a consensus around this point of backwards 
compatibility. I understand that not achieving backwards compatibility has 
negative ramifications for existing adopters. But applying the 
straitjacket too tightly could mean that little to no innovation can 
occur, which has even larger negative ramifications in the long term.
 
Is there a consensus one way or another from the E4 team? I?ve scanned the 
E4 Summit materials and did not see any explicit conclusion on this point.
 
I am expecting that this effort will not undermine the existing platform 
look & feel that SWT/JFace default to or break backwards compatibility. 

We have a lot of products built on this platform, backwards compatibility 
is effectively mandatory. _______________________________________________
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