Get rid of the version.properties file by default

Development
1

Hi xwikiers,

The main point of the version.properties file (indicating the version of the product) is actually already covered (by XWIKI-21210) and deleting it usually does not have any visible consequence.

But there is one hack for which it’s still common to use it: adding some custom information in the footer to indicate what is the current instance you ended up on in the case of a cluster. This is actually quite a bad idea technically, because some features that rely on XWiki#getVersion() might get broken in that case (since it end up with a version that does not exist).

So I would like to propose two things:

  1. Display the cluster member id in the footer when clustering is enabled, so that we don’t need this hack anymore.
  2. And with that out of the way, I would like to finally propose to get rid of the version.properties file by default. I’m not planning on removing any code, so you could still use it to overwrite what XWiki#getVersion() returns, but we would stop putting it in the standard WAR, considering that it’s useless information duplication 99% of the time.

WDYT ?

Here is my +1 for 1. and 2..

2

+1 for 1 and 2.

I’d say that we could also display the cluster member id in the REST API, like we display the xwiki version.

3

Do you mean unless an Admin defines the content of the footer in the Admin UI, right? If so, +1. Otherwise -1 since Admins may not want to display this technical information all the time.

+1. It could have been used to know the version of XWiki on the filesystem but that can be found by checking other files (WEB-INF/lib jar names or other files).

Thx

4

I’m of course talking about the default footer content, next to the product name and the version. If the admin customize it that’s another story.

Yes, there are much more accurate ways to know the product or base XWiki versions (XWiki#getVersion() itself is really not something I would recommend to use in general).

5

+1 of 1 and 2, thanks