TCF/DraftPlan14

TCF 1.4 DRAFT plan

TCF 1.4 has been released.
See the 1.4 New and Noteworthy and the TCF 1.4 Release Review.

See also previous TCF/DraftPlan13, TCF/NewIn13 | Upcoming TCF/DraftPlan15

Compatibility

TCF 1.4 will release with Neon/Simultaneous_Release_Plan on June 22, 2016. We will keep API's compatible:

• TCF protocol must remain 100% compatible with TCF 1.3 (it's part of the TCF value proposition)
• TCF Java API must remain 100% binary compatible with TCF 1.3 (we have clients coding against it)
• TCF Python and C API should remain 100% compatible (we have clients but this is source compatibility so they can rebuild or use version checks)
• All API Additions must be tagged with @since 1.4 comments.

Operating Environments

• Java 7 will be the Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment for Java code.
• We want to continue with an "N-1" dependency strategy in order to ease adoption:
  • This means, that during the Mars SR cycle 2015/16 (until Neon comes out), we want to support at least Mars (the "active" Eclipse) and Luna SR2 (the stable Eclipse).
  • Support for older Eclipse Platform (Kepler, 3.8.2) will continue on a "best effort" basis but will not be committed.

• To be discussed:
  • Do we need any test job using Java 8 ? - Linuxtools project has reported that Jobs with Java 8 run faster.
  • Do we still need a test job against Eclipse 3.8.2 + CDT 8.3 ? - Note that CDT 8.4 only supports Eclipse 4.x

Obsoleted / Deprecated Functionality

• None currently planned.

Proposed Themes

The Themes below only list current priorities that we want to focus on. More themes may be carried over from the TCF 1.3 Plan (TCF/DraftPlan13 in Wiki format).

Improve Getting Started and API Documentation

Interested Parties: Wind River

• We want to make it easier for 3rd parties to understand, and code against the TCF API's.
  • This shall be supported by providing simple examples for commonly needed functionality.

• We also want to provide Tutorials / Videos that showcase the TCF / Target Explorer functionality as available from Eclipse.

Improve ARM Stack Crawler

• Including aarch64 and thumb

Collaborate with Linux Distro Builders

Interested Parties: Wind River

• As it turned out that openembedded still references tcf-0.4 , we want to collaborate with Linux Distro builders helping them upgrade to a more recent version.