Version Compare Tool

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'.

Feature Version, Plug-in Version, and Java Class

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.

How to use this tool?

We provide two approaches to use this tool. It can be executed as an Eclipse plug-in which provides GUI to select input information:

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]