: If they are " no longer actively developing the portion of the code that's : broken, aren't seeking the new feature, etc", and they stay back on old : versions... isn't that exactly what we want? They can stay on the old version, : and new application development uses the newer version.
This basically mirrors a philosophy that is rising in the Perl community evangelized by (a really smart dude named chromatic) ... "why are we worry about the effect of upgrades on users who don't upgrade?" The problem is not all users are created equal and not all users upgrade for the same reasons or at the same time... Group A: If someone is paranoid about upgrading, and is still running lucene1.4.3 because they are afraid if they upgrade their app will break and they don't want to deal with it; they don't care about known bugs in lucene1.4.3, as long as those bugs haven't impacted them yet -- these people aren't going to care wether we add a bunch of new methods to interfaces, or remove a bunch of public methods from arbitrary releases, because they are never going to see them. They might do a total rewrite of their project later, and they'll worry about it then (when they have lots of time and QA resources) Group: B: At the other extreme, are the "free-spirited" developers (god i hate that that the word "agile" has been co-opted) who are always eager to upgrade to get the latest bells and whistles, and don't mind making changes to code and recompiling everytime they upgrades -- just as long as there are some decent docs on what to change. Croup: C: In the middle is a larg group of people who are interested in upgrading, who want bug fixes, are willing to write new code to take advantage of new features, in some cases are even willing to make small or medium changes their code to get really good performance improvements ... but they don't have a lot of time or energy to constantly rewrite big chunks of their app. For these people, knowing that they can "drop in" the new version and it will work is a big reason why there are willing to upgrade, and why they are willing to spend soem time tweaking code to take advantage of the new features and the new performacne enhaced APIs -- becuase they don't have to spend a lot of time just to get the app working as well as it was before. To draw an analogy... Group A will stand in one place for a really long time no matter how easy the path is. Once in a great while they will decide to march forward dozens of miles in one big push, but only once they feel they have adequate resources to make the entire trip at once. Group B likes to frolic, and will happily take two sptens backward and then 3 steps forward every day. Group C will walk forward with you at a steady pace, and occasionally even take a step back before moving forward, but only if the path is clear and not very steap. : I bet, if you did a poll of all Lucene users, you would find a majority of : them still only run 1.4.3, or maybe 1.9. Even with 2.0, 2.3, or 3.0, that is : still going to be the case. That's probably true, but a nice perk of our current backwards compatibility commitments is that when people pop up asking questions about 1.4.3, we can give them like "upgrading to 2.0.0 solves your problem" and that advice isn't a death sentence -- the steps to move forward are small and easy. I look at things the way things like Maven v1 vs v2 worked out, and how that fractured the community for a long time (as far as i can tell it's still pretty fractured) because the path from v1 to v2 was so steep and involved backtracking so much and i worry that if we make changes to our "copatibility pledge" that don't allow for an even forward walk, we'll wind up with a heavily fractured community. -Hoss --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
