It's apparently a frequent problem for users to have the wrong expectation on compatibility across Hibernate projects - in particular Hibernate Search vs Hibernate ORM.

Let's explore the possibility to fail fast when we detect a version of Hibernate ORM which is not the one we expect to be compatible with, and throw a pretty clear error message.

I realize such a system can't be 100% foolproof nor take into account all of future versions, but being able to detect some versions which are definitely not compatible would be better than nothing.