On Wed, 2014-03-12 at 23:30 -0400, Daniel Herring wrote: > On Wed, 12 Mar 2014, Faré wrote: > > > Major changes like that happen less than once a year (ASDF 2 in 2010, > > ASDF 3 in 2013, ASDF 3.1 soon in 2014), and while > > backward-compatibility has always been a huge priority, improvements > > sometimes do mean the recommended way of using ASDF changes, for the > > better. > > For essential infrastructure like what ASDF claims to be, I expect major > changes to happen less than once every 5 to 10 years.
You can expect whatever you want, but unless somebody is paid full-time to work on ASDF, it's not going to happen. > The more backwards compatibility, the better. Projects like glibc > have developed significant infrastructure to enable transparent > improvements (see the ABI compliance checker, DSO symbol versioning, > etc.). See above. That kind of backwards-compatibility is very difficult and burdensome. > Every breaking change inflicts cost on a fraction of the existing > userbase, in exchange for some proposed benefit to future users. Every > time I have to debug breakage and change something or redesign my workflow > to maintain existing capability, it encourages me to explore other, more > stable or better designed options... > > Sometimes "good ideas" fade after a month or two of reflection. Some > survive the test because the benefit truly outweighs the cost. When that > is the case, it is often helps to give the community time to prepare and > minimize the number of times the community must change. So propose the > change, allow a long RFC window, allow users to obtain test > implementations (while still promoting the stable branch), wait a while > for several changes to collect before pushing them into major new > releases, etc. I agree that an RFC-like process would be useful, instead of jumping in and implementing new features, as long as it's not too lengthy. -- Stelian Ionescu a.k.a. fe[nl]ix Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
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