[Uml-devel] XMI standard for Umbrello?

[Jonathan Riddell]

On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 03:34:41PM -0400, Brian Thomas wrote:
> 	Hurm. I know I've asked this before, but perhaps opinion is clearer and 
> 	more vioces this time around (?!). Currently Umbrello appears to be 
> 	using a 1.1.5 version of XMI spec, but the OMG group is up to 1.2 and 
> 	2.0 as the production and stable development standards (they are 
> 	currenly hashing out 2.1 version).

xmi.version="1.2"

The 1.1.5 is just the internal version of the Umbrello file format.
It means newer than Umbrello 1.1.1.  It will probably be bumped up to
1.2 when the Umbrello version number is as well to make things nice
and neat.

> 	Any opinions on what Umbrello should use? Of course, changes away 
> 	from 1.1 will break any old save files, but are going to be needed if we 
> 	ever want to have Umbrello XMI files be consistent with (and readable 
> 	by) other UML tools.

The Umbrello file format is so wildly different from XMI anyway that
it effectivly doesn't matter.  I don't know of any two UML tools that
use XMI files that are compatible anyway.

> 	Having spent minimal amount of time on this, I personally have no 
> 	particular opinion on this, other than we should at least consider a 
> 	move to the 1.2 spec. What about breaking the current 1.2 format, 
> 	acceptable or not? If not, when  does the umbrello app move to a 
> 	more current version of XMI, 1.3, 2.0? (In the past, the decision was
> 	to wait for 2.0, but now that version doesnt even appear to be being
> 	developed anymore. How long must I wait to update the XMI version?? ;)
> 
> 	Anybody out there more familiar with the XMI spec versions, and the 
> 	pros/cons of each? I would like to start considering how to put the 
> 	new code generation parameters into the XMI files. 

It would be nice if there was any kind of book on XMI, but I only know
of one and it wasn't very good.

XMI seems to be in such a state of change anyway that I by the time we
were compliant with one version there would probably be another.

For the moment I think we're in a state where any extentions to the
file format should be
- clean and simple
- backwards compatible with older versions of Umbrello file format
- preferably related to XMI in some way but not necessarily.

Jonathan Riddell