Just a small update about what is currently in the...

# testballoon

[Oliver.O]

Just a small update about what is currently in the works:

All TestBalloon releases so far support all Kotlin versions since 2.0.0 up to the latest 2.4.20-Beta1. That means whether you are tied to an older Kotlin 2.x release or require the latest EAP, you can still count on the latest TestBalloon capabilities being there for you.

Currently, TestBalloon release sets come in variants for 8 different Kotlin compiler APIs, with each variant containing the Gradle and compiler plugins, as well as the libraries for all 26 Kotlin targets. The resulting file count and the number of releases exceed the upcoming Maven Central publishing limits. While there is no imminent risk of the limits being applied to TestBalloon, and an exemption has been requested, it makes sense to consolidate the number of releases and artifacts. That means releasing one TestBalloon version for all supported Kotlin compiler versions, and letting the compiler plugin auto-adapt to the Kotlin version.

Once that is done, hopefully in about 2 weeks time, TestBalloon releases will be easier (no backports required) and quicker to provide. Fixes for existing issues will ship right after that stage is completed, and the regular (and more visible) evolution will continue.

In case anything urgent comes up in the mean time, a maintenance release can be published at any time. But I don't expect that. TestBalloon can be really boring. 😉

[Edoardo Luppi]

I'd probably also keep only the latest 3 majors, so 2.2 up to 2.4 right now.
Going backwards to 2.0 is probably not necessary given the audience, which to me appears willing to update more often.

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

Hey, FWIW, the Metro approach using service loaders and some runtime logic to pick the right service seems to work pretty well, so you might want to adopt that.

[Oliver.O]

This is exactly what I'm doing, although (as always) a bit more lightweight. And yes, everything back to 2.0.0 may not be necessary: https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/C09FQGG85EC/p1782135860141659

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

Given the fact that it's new updates (bugfixes, features, etc), I think the people on pre-2.2 can cope. They can always use the already-published test balloon versions.

[Oliver.O]

Sure. The only thing where it matters is if they'd like to have some fix or added feature that's not present in an earlier release.

[Youssef Shoaib [MOD]]

I'm not fully familiar with test balloon compiler plugin, but how were you doing multi versioning now? Different git branches?

[Oliver.O]

Yes, all under releases like so: github.com/infix-de/testBalloon/commits/…/…

[Eugen Martynov]

Nice! Slack and Metro are doing some alpha/beta kotlin build checks - just to make sure they spot things earlier.