Danek Duvall wrote: > > I'm not saying there isn't, but I don't know -- I'm not terribly familiar > with lighttpd. But I strongly get the sense that some teams are versioning > the installations because they don't actually want to do the work to find > out whether a) there actually are incompatibilities between the releases > they might conceivably ship, b) those incompatibilities are relevant to > customers and not something the distro can smooth over the transition, and
I know the project team has been working closely with the community so they should have a fairly good understanding of the expectations. Maybe Amanda & Jan can add some more info here. That said, not even Jan can predict the future of lighttpd interface compatibility 5-10 years down the road. > c) customers really will want more than one version at a time, rather than > making a jump. As to (c), I'll assert that very few customers are willing or able to do a sudden jump which breaks their configuration & modules & administrative familiarity. That's noncontroversial. That's why versioning and transition periods are the norm and a messy necessity. > > They do it presumably for the same reasons several of the OpenSolaris > > project teams have felt the need, which is to provide stability within a > > given major release family while at the same time making the > > newer-generation apps available. > > I'd like to take the "presumably" out of that. If there's a real need for > the versioning, let's hear it. If there isn't, let's not do it. "presumably" refers to "they" which is a pointer to the subject in the previous paragraph: debian. I don't speak for debian, so presumably it is. > Unfortunately, the release taxonomy is being shredded at the moment. We Yah. Most of these projects have interfaces better than volatile but not quite uncommitted. Whatever comes out of future models driven by Indiana etc will surely change some things. But meanwhile, project teams will need to continue to use the existing model so work can go on. Amanda Waite wrote: > > commit to. Based on this it's possible that we could delay versioning > Lighttpd, but it really would only be a delay, because at some point we > will hit incompatibilities that will require us to version Lighttpd, > almost definitely with the next non-micro release. Delaying versioning is messy (look at the troubles that apache22 went when adding versioned directories when previous apache2 didn't have it). You're much better off introducing versioning if you suspect it is needed. It's easier to transition off it if time shows you don't end up needing it than to retrofit it in later when you're in trouble. -- Jyri J. Virkki - jyri.virkki at sun.com - Sun Microsystems
