Prepare for the termination of Eclipse User Storage Service

[merks]

Oomph's Preference Synchronizer uses the deprecated Eclipse.org service:

The planned termination for this services is for July of this year:

https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/helpdesk/-/issues/4696#note_2340773

While it's possible in principle to provide some alternative mechanism for storage sharing, it's not clear whether there is any real demand for that. At this point we simply plan to remove this support and all code related to it from Oomph.

The plan is to present this non-modal dialog to the user if they have the service enabled:

This enables the user to easily disable the use of the service, or to continue to use the service. If the user chooses the latter, they will be reminded again (via this dialog) after a week has elapsed. The dialog includes a link to this issue so users can find out more details and can comment on this issue if they wish to do so.

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I instrumented a fake service that throws exceptions for all methods. Mostly these are silently ignored, sometimes with logged exceptions. If one tries to record a preference and share it with the remote service:

that will display a failure:

[khatchad]

While it's possible in principle to provide some alternative mechanism for storage sharing, it's not clear whether there is any real demand for that.

If there is no storage sharing, how can the preferences sync?

[merks]

Since both the libraries for the service, i.e., https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipse/usssdk/org.eclipse.usssdk, as well as the Eclipse.org service itself are being removed, I really don't see much in the way of alternatives that could work for everyone out of the box.

I just wanted to double check that there isn't a misunderstanding: Preferences can still be recorded and will still be applied uniformly to every workspace, they just can't be stored in a central location and subsequently shared across multiple machines anymore. They're stored here in the home folder of the user's account on any give machine and that will continue to function well:

Perhaps someone will want this capability enough to contribute toward an alternative implementation. Unfortunately my capacity for providing that is very limited...

[I-Xenophon-I]

I use this feature and like to have it or something like this in the future.