On 4/25/10 11:48 AM, Shai Erera wrote:
I think that it's a bit naive to think that stable and unstable will
remain that close to each other such that merging them every so often
is going to be an even remotely easy task.
Mark - you recommend that we look at other projects and how it's done
there. Well, I don't know too many open source projects, but I've
participated in several products development. From my experience
there, after a release is cut, a new branch is created (for that
release). All new development happens on the next release's branch
(trunk in our case) and usually only bug fixes are developed on the
previous branch (and often on several such branches). Sometimes, a new
feature/enhancement which is being developed on trunk is pulled to the
previous branch on demand.
That really depends on varies. If you want to look at what others do you
can probably find close to whatever you want. Just remember that Lucene
is a library.
Now, backward compatibility on trunk is a must, but at a slightly
different level than we know it. The customer must be able to upgrade
his env. to the newest release w/o losing functionality. Exceptions
are allowed, but they have to be well documented.
From what I see, we behave very much like a product. The new release
is always bw compatible, exceptions are allowed when they are well
documented, and no one makes any decisions lightly around here.
I think we behave like a widely used library.
This is not very open sourcy :). No one here gets paid, we don't share
Lucene dividents w/ the committers and contributors ...
I don't follow...
I'm not saying that we should throw back compat out the door entirely,
but some relaxation must be allowed … today, trunk is already back
compat w/ exceptions. Can't we decide instead of developing on two
branches that we will sometimes allow for larger bw breaks, when it
makes sense? Why are we trying to have an "all or nothing" here?
If you follow what I have argued, this makes no sense. When did I ever
say all or nothing? I'm so far from that, I just don't know what to make
of this paragraph.
And Mark, as soon as we allow trunk to break loose, it won't be like
merging flex and trunk today - both were developed w/ bw support in
mind …
Most patches are not that difficult to port. Back compat with flex was
many times two different paths. So you would merge changes almost in two
steps - first almost without considering back compat, and the back
compat way. The flex branch experience tells us a lot about how things
might work with different branches in the future. The situations won't
be identical, but there is certainly a lot of overlap. IMO most patches
will be easy to handle - much easier than dealing with the old back
compat "policy".
One other option - let's adopt the way of projects like Java. You
don't see every 1.6 feature being ported to 1.5 right? Not every 7
gets to 6 … rather, developmen happens in parallel on several
branches. Each is fully managed on its own and at some point some
versions are simply not supported anymore…
This works better with larger projects. This could be a first step
towards such a world, but with the number of devs we have, starting at
two main branches seems like a good starting point.
it would make a lot of sense to declare flex as 4.0, along w/
analyzers, parallel indexing and even incremental field updates. It
doesn't mean though that every new feature that is contributed to
trunk MUST be backported to 3.x. It can be done on demand, on a
volunteering basis or simply an interest. We may also want to prevent
such a thing from happening for several features …
I don't agree with that obviously. This is what I argue against.
Just tossing ideas …
Shai
On Sunday, April 25, 2010, Mark Miller<markrmil...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 4/25/10 9:55 AM, Robert Muir wrote:
On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Mark Miller<markrmil...@gmail.com
<mailto:markrmil...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Could you elaborate on "it doesn't help anything"? That's an
interesting argument, but not very persuasive :) "It doesn't help
anything other than easing Mark's paranoia" :)
The only "advantage" to this idea is it seems to try to enforce putting
features in stable, but thats stupid. At the end you still have two
branches, you can call whichever one trunk you want, it doesn't really
matter. if someone doesn't want to do the work to backport something to
stable, they just aren't going to do it.
I may be misunderstanding, but this sounds like a call for "free for all"
because everyone will do what they want anyway. But that's not generally how things work.
Devs don't do whatever they want. They largely stick to some common practices (largely
back compat). Not everyone has always agreed with how things have worked, but most have,
and it has framed development.
I think you take policy too seriously. From what I was told, our back compat policy
was simply extracted from an email from Doug when in the early days of Lucene. It's
just happened to have made its way to the wiki, and enough devs have tried to stick
to what it says. It's not some all powerful policy - we have subverted it all the
time - but it has framed development and created a lot of really good Lucene
releases that where pretty easy to migrate across. People have generally agreed on
the back compat policy due to a large amount of discussion in the past. Its been
argued back and forth, but to a large extent we have stuck with it for whatever
reason. There is no doubt its had a powerful affect on Lucene over the years,
whether positive or negative is up for debate, but I've been pretty happy with how
Lucene has progressed myself. Now it looks like its time to change how we frame
development, but I don't find myself thinking, "who cares how we do it - devs
will do whate
ver they want anyway". Because they won't. They will do what the majority of others are
doing - so as we talk about making this change its important to learn which way the other devs
are leaning, and hammer out some common goals. Figure out a little consensus. If I'm the only
one that's "paranoid" about this, doesn't seem you have much to worry about.
It would be easy to see different results from this change - we could go the
way some are talking about and do very few back ports to stable, and
essentially every release breaks back compat as it wants. Or we could
concentrate more on stable releases, while doing more radical dev on trunk. It
almost sounds to me that you think that it doesn't matter which way people
prefer, because everyone will do what they want anyway. Well I disagree. I
think its important to discuss which way we may end up with, because I think
one of the ways is better for Lucene - and I don't think devs do whatever they
want. The general common agreement about how things are done largely drives
what devs do. We are talking about changing that agreement - I don't have
paranoia - I want to discuss where we will end up because I think its an
important change to Lucene, and its important to try and see how different devs
feel, and what frame of mind they are going to go into this with. That will
help gu
ide what actually happens. I know you don't think that's important, and I
apologize for disagreeing with you.
i'm waiting for the proposal
that adds some "policy" about this, that would be very lucene-like.
Yeah, because Lucene has so many polices. The backcompat policy is called
'policy' for convenience - its never been voted in, its not an 'official'
policy, we break that policy all the time. Its more consensus on how things are
done than policy - you've seen that by now I hope. This discussion is also
about coming up with consensus. I''m going to call you paranoid about policies
in a minute :)
and for any feature where someone is willing to do the work for it to be
in stable or unstable, its gonna have to be committed twice, by someone,
somewhere.
Yeah, well sounds like right now we have a couple options to talk about -
consensus that we generally commit to both at the same time, or consenus that
we merge occasionally instead. The models actually have a lot of differences.
And likely there would be some mergers that did it often (like with flex), so
that fewer devs might be backporting. The other way you would generally be
counted on to back port all your own stuff.
--
Robert Muir
rcm...@gmail.com<mailto:rcm...@gmail.com>
--
- Mark
http://www.lucidimagination.com
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