William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
I agree that is a conflict, and I can't really decide which way I favor. It seems attractive to say that we will bump the minor version number (in Major.Minor.Revision style) whenever we lose forward-compatibility. But then we could wind up with weird things like having to bump from 2.2.x to 2.4.0, but not integrate the changes from 2.3.x (because they are not ready for stable). That would be way too confusing.One bit concerns me, we cannot state that "we will break MMN compat between security fixes" and "modules are always forward compatible within a version (e.g. 2.1).
I guess I therefore lean towards saying that we will maintain as much foward compatibility as possible within a Minor version, but we will break it if necessary.
(One other alternative would be to call the unstable tree 3.x. Then each time 3.x becomes stable we pull it into 2.x and start again with 3.(x+1). When we want a Major revision to stable we call it 4.0. I'm guessing that is a little too big a numerical leap for most people to think about.)
Joshua.
