The version compare tool is developed to verify Eclipse feature versions and plug-in versions. The full name of this plug-in tool is 'org.eclipse.pde.tools.versioning'.
Figure 1 shows the hierarchy of feature, plug-in and Java Class. From the hierarchy, it is easy to understand that updates on Java classes will cause plug-in update; plug-in, feature updates will cause feature updates. Therefore, if we want to verify if a feature is correct, we need to verify versions of its included features and plug-ins; to verify the version of a plug-in, we need to check updates on the Java classes it contains.
Anyone, who has some experience on Eclipse, must knows there are a bunch of features and plug-ins under an Eclipse installation. Thus, it is difficult to manually check whether the new versions of features and plug-ins have been updated correctly. This tool will help people to verify the new feature versions and plug-in versions.
We provide two approaches to use this tool. It can be executed as an Eclipse plug-in which provides GUI to select input information:
/features
directory under an Eclipse installation directory, or included in the Eclipse configuration file
(usually it is the \configuration\org.eclipse.updateplatform.xml
file under an Eclipse installation directory).It can be executed in command line as an Eclipse application. The usage is:
java -cp startup.jar org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main -application org.eclipse.pde.tools.versioning.VersionVerifier -new [path] -old [path] -option [path] -output [path] [-pluginCompare] [-consoleOutput]