On Mon, 2002-09-16 at 23:32, Justin Erenkrantz wrote: > On Mon, Sep 16, 2002 at 09:46:47AM -0700, Brian Pane wrote: > > I disagree entirely. There's no need to let the API keep changing > > continuously, especially not for the sake of "correctness." All of > > our competitors provide API stability. And as a result, people who > > develop modules for, say, IIS or IPlanet don't need to worry about > > their code breaking with every maintenance release. > > I think you're missing a huge point here. > > You *cannot* tell IIS or iPlanet that their APIs suck.
Of course you can. And if you're a big enough customer, your server vendor will take your comments seriously enough to improve APIs in the next major release. What a responsible vendor will not do, however, is break all their other customers' systems in the next maintenance release just because one customer didn't like the function signatures. > You probably > can't even fix problems in their servers. You're stuck. > > You *can* tell us that our APIs suck and provide patches on ways to > improve - especially for 2.0. Sure. And we have an obligation to users and third party developers to take constructive input and work it in to future releases in a manner that won't break people's systems. Brian
