[jbosstools-dev] DISCUSSION REQUIRED :: new profile in parent pom for locally testing (old) PRs

[Nick Boldt]

Rob & Martin raised a workflow concern yesterday concerning old PRs.

* Tester installs the latest JBT CI build, eg., from 20160921

* a 5-day old PR is checked out and built (using the jgit timestamp
provider). Because of the jgit timestamp provider, plugins and
features changed by the PR get the 5-day old timestamp, eg., 20160916

* Tester then tries to INSTALL the locally-built project, but Eclipse
won't let them downgrade from 20160921 to 20160916 version of the
changed plugin, because there are newer versions of those same
features/plugins in the latest CI.

Solution?

Force the tester's local build to use CURRENT UTC time/date, making
all features/plugins appear newer to Eclipse.

PR: https://github.com/jbosstools/jbosstools-build/pull/232

Then build with `mvn clean verify -PR`.

Caveat:

If you install all these features/plugins into your local Eclipse or
devstudio, then try to update from that to a newer nightly/CI build,
you may be told you can't downgrade (as those "newer" features will
have older timestamps). If this happens just uninstall your local
build and update from the latest CI build instead.

Further discussion:

https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBIDE-23206

Do you like this idea? Or is this a terrible idea, when you could just
merge/rebase the PR against the latest HEAD.

Discuss.

-- 
Nick Boldt :: JBoss by Red Hat
Productization Lead :: JBoss Tools & Dev Studio
http://nick.divbyzero.com