A customer of mine is using IDEA 6 for their project and I'd like to use IDEA 8. I know that IDEA 8 gives the option of upgrading the project or keeping it in the v6 format. If I use IDEA 8 but keep it in v6 format, will this give any grief to the the IDEA 6 users?
+2
A:
Unless the project files change a lot, you might want to just make a copy of the v6 project files and let Idea upgrade them to v8. This would avoid any kind of change (intentional or otherwise) that would cause problems in Idea 6.
Marc Novakowski
2009-02-10 22:57:40
+1
A:
My recent experience of upgrading to IJ8 from 6 while keeping version 6 files has been so much of a mess (bad management of file encodings, skewed ant files, various freezes), I have renamed IntelliJ 8 "StoopidJ".
My advice would be, if you can keep version 6, keep it.
Varkhan
2009-02-10 22:58:55
IntelliJ changed substantially between versions 6 and 7. I don't find 8 to be bad; the mistake is hanging onto version 6 too long, in my opinion.
duffymo
2009-02-11 15:06:04
7 is driving me mad... it freezes, hangs all the time. This is on medium sized projects (10K classes) on Windows on me and my colleagues' pc's.
Egwor
2009-02-11 19:27:36
Version 7 is much faster than 6, and Maven integration is a must for me. The differences between 7 and 8 were not that dramatic, just some small improvements and new features. In overall I'm satisfied with 8.1.
Esko Luontola
2009-02-11 21:20:15
+1
A:
I would suggest you not share project files between users. If you take a copy of their project files, just keep this as a local copy.
Peter Lawrey
2009-02-11 19:25:13
+3
A:
IDEA has always upgraded my project files without problems, but I don't think that it is backwards compatible. If you want to maintain backwards compatibility, store only the IDEA 6 projects files in version control, and keep the IDEA 8 projects files only locally.
Another possibility would be to not store the IDEA project files in version control at all. Use Maven or something else to manage the project dependencies. Since IDEA 7 it has been possible to import a Maven project to IDEA. (And I recommend upgrading from 6 to at least 7 just for the performance improvements that it gives, let alone other new features.)
Esko Luontola
2009-02-11 21:27:13