[Xapian-discuss] Deprecation policy question

[James Aylett]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2007 at 05:55:18PM +0100, Richard Boulton wrote:

> 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.

Hmm, yeah. My view here:

 * breaking the ABI can be done at minors; since there will now be a
   /reasonable/ chance that a minor will deprecate something, you
   probably need to do code changes to keep perfectly up to date, so
   recompiling isn't really an issue

 * breaking the API can be done at majors; it's possible we could do
   it exceptionally at minors, by concensus on the list where we know
   that the number of impacted users is low, and the negative impact
   is considerably less than the net gain -- however it's easier to
   just break the API only at majors (not counting deprecations)

 * breaking the db format should (a) only be done at majors, (b)
   hopefully won't happen again anyway ;-)

J

-- 
/--------------------------------------------------------------------------\
  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james at tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org