Eclipse project files compatibility with previous versions of Eclipse?

Question

I need to save Eclipse CDT project files ( .project and .cproject ) in the source control repository. I also need to be able to support new versions of Eclipse once they are available, leaving the old version available for others to use before they update too.

How should I name the project directory to best reflect the Eclipse version that can open the saved project files? Current project files have been created with Eclipse Oxygen.3 Release (4.7.3).

Example directory names I am thinking about:

/prj/eclipse
/prj/eclipse-4
/prj/eclipse-4.7
/prj/eclipse-4.7.3

I think the main question here is at what point does the Eclipse break backward compatibility with regards to project files?

Answer 1

CDT doesn't make any guarantees about the stability of the .cproject format, so any CDT release could break backwards compatibility of project files.

In practice, I think the only major breakage recently has been in Eclipse Photon (4.8) due to the introduction of the new Core Build system. I believe things have been pretty stable for a while before that, though I can't be sure as this isn't really tracked anywhere.