For a little bit of historical context - when filing ACCUMULO-751 to ask for wire compatibility, I had no intention of providing both forward and backwards compatibility. I really wanted the ability to do rolling upgrades where I could upgrade tablet servers one-by-one and not have suffer any cluster downtime. Everything else could be completely incompatible, but as long as the cluster could handle a part upgraded state, then that was fine.
On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 6:56 PM, Christopher <ctubb...@apache.org> wrote: > 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 >
