Sean comment on ACCUMULO-2343: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ACCUMULO-2343?focusedCommentId=13973504&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-13973504
I was going to comment in IRC or in response in JIRA, but I think this would better serve the group to discuss here. My response was going to be: You seem to keep insisting that we don't have consensus on basic API guarantees. I don't think that's true. We may not have a complete policy, but I think we have some agreement on some of the basics of what we want users to be able to expect. It's still a good idea to think about compatibility forwards and backwards, within a release line, and I'm pretty sure we all agree on that. Lack of complete policy is not the same as lack of agreement on some of the things that policy would contain. Perhaps we've been too permissive in the past and not pushed back as hard on it, in order to avoid controversy, but I don't think it's a lack of agreement at play. My question for the larger group is: Am I wrong? Do we, or do we not, want compatibility between different versions in a release line (1.4.x, 1.5.x, 1.6.x, etc.)? My suspicion is that we do, and it's the reason I introduced the wire version in 1.5.x, as a step towards this. I'd like us to continue making steps towards this, and even in the absence of a strict versioning policy, we take care to think about this, and be less permissive about introduction of changes within a release line that would not be compatible with previous releases in that line. In my view, *any* comprehensive versioning policy we adopt is going to include the idea that the last segment of the versioning denotes a bugfix release. Is there any possibility at all that we'd adopt a policy that doesn't include this? I think not. So, why not be more strict about this now? Personally, I'd love to start vetoing non-bugfix changes to previous release lines, but I want to ensure that I'm doing so with the community, and not against it. -- Christopher L Tubbs II http://gravatar.com/ctubbsii
