That's a fair point, but the main point I was trying to make using that example was that there are concrete efforts which have been made to inch closer to better compatibility guarantees, and compatibility... specifically within a supported release line... is something that we routinely consider and discuss.
-- Christopher L Tubbs II http://gravatar.com/ctubbsii On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 9:51 PM, Mike Drob <mad...@cloudera.com> wrote: > 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 >>
