[Xapian-discuss] Deprecation policy question

[Richard Boulton]

James Aylett wrote:
>>> The thing is that I'm not convinced there's a problem with bumping the
>>> minor version when we start a deprecation cycle. I don't see how that
>>> can hurt, and it allows everything else to work smoothly.
>> I think, in practice, this would simply mean that almost every release 
>> was a minor release.
> 
> Really? If our API is really that volatile, and will continue to be
> so, then I'd argue we have a different problem.

Hmm.  Well, I probably overstated the case.  1.0.1 and 1.0.2 contained 
no new deprecations.  Historically, 1.0.0, 0.9.6 and 0.9.0 saw 
deprecations in the core (though we weren't really trying to follow any 
particular policy before 1.0.0, so the historical information is arguable).

The suggestion from you, and also from Jean-Francois that we should 
actually make a minor release whenever we feel that we want to add a 
deprecation (as opposed to waiting until we were going to make a minor 
release anyway, and then add deprecations) sounds plausible to me.  That 
way, we don't have any delay in putting the warning macro in place, and 
also have no delay.

The downside is that it becomes less clear when it's okay to break the 
ABI and API.  Using major releases to denote that is an option, but 
means we'll probably have about 1 major release a year, which somehow 
seems wrong.

-- 
Richard