From: "Adam Heath" <[email protected]>
David E Jones wrote:
I just want to make one thing clear related to this: if _I_ make changes that are not backward compatible then it's because they
are really important and no one should question them; if anyone else makes (or proposes) a change that I don't like and I can
raise the backward compatibility flag then I will, and you should respect that and just don't do whatever the thing is. Don't
worry, I'll be sure to make strong statements and appeal to authority and popularity of patterns so that you can justify it to
whoever you feel responsible to. Of course, those outward reasons are the very things that you'll never be able to argue against,
no matter how inapplicable or extreme or pragmatically unhelpful they might be.
Now, if anyone disagrees with my position on this then that's fine, as long as you don't feel like you can behave this way and
that you never have behaved this way. Any challengers?
-Not David
Gah, I hate you now. I just ruined a perfectly good keyboard, it's
covered in coffee. And my shirt is going to be stained.
P.S. On a more serious note, I'm not a huge fan of universal backward compatibility (or of changes that cause hidden breaking of
backward compatibility... better to break things completely than make things seem like they are working even though existing code
fails, like type conversion changes and such). Sometimes it takes a while to figure out the best way to do things, and why keep
the problematic and bad ways of doing things when we do figure it out? If a hexagonal wheel works so much better than a square
wheel that square wheels don't make sense anymore, to the point where they caused more problems than they solved, why not
encourage everyone to change and just stop supporting the bad design? And yes, sooner or later we're gonna figure out that a good
round shape is better than a hexagon and then we'll have to change again... and it'll be WELL worth it and users will thank us a
lot for fixing those issues. Just because we haven't fixed a bad idea for a long time doesn't
make it any better of an idea.
Restating what I said earlier, I was never actually against adding a
new target. I just took exception to the renaming of the existing
one. That implied that it was going away.
ps: I think the 'run-' prefix is superfluous. ant install, ant
install-demo seems better to me.
I agree with the ps: I thought the same while in bed (it's the place where I
think most :o)
Jacques
