My 2 cents. It is ALWAYS possible to maintain binary compatibility. The downside is that it is ugly and gets unmaintainable over time and it occasionally forces you to create new classes or methods where you would have liked to have reuse the old name. Such is life.
An acceptable compromise is to maintain deprecated methods and classes for a release or two and then remove them. Ralph -----Original Message----- From: Oleg Kalnichevski [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, July 06, 2003 2:33 PM To: Commons HttpClient Project Subject: RE: cvscommit: jakarta-commons/httpclient/src/test/org/apache/commons/httpclientTestAut henticator.javaTestHttpState.javaTestHttps.java TestMethodsExternalHost.javaTestWebappBasicAuth.java Vincent, I have a feeling that you somehow suspect me of waking up this morning and thinking: "Geez, I feel like screwing up those HttpClient APIs. Wouldn't that be fun?". Believe me, I am not THAT bad Please allow me to copy verbatim the paragraph from the release plan that I wrote: ------------------------------------------------------------------ Objective: The objective of the 2.1 release of HttpClient is to build upon the foundation laid with the previous release while addressing those architectural shortcomings and flaws identified during 2.0 development process. Several well known and much complained about problems could not be resolved without sacrificing API stability. The primary motivation behind the 2.1 is to fix those design limitations, breaking 2.0 API compatibility where absolutely unavoidable, while preserving overall compatibility with 2.0 use patterns. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Cmon, what else am I supposed to say to make you beleive? And of course, it just goes without saying that each and every patch will be discussed on this mailing list and committed only if there are enough confidence that it satisfies the above stated criteria. You are welcome to dispute the merits of each individual API breakage, but just demanding 100% compatibility with 2.0 release no matter what will effectively halt further development of HttpClient. Cheers Oleg --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
