Hi folks,

Recently we have a conversation on YARN-2209 about the incompatible changes
over releases. For those API changes that will break binary compatibility,
source compatibility towards the existing API users, we've already had a
rather clear picture about what we should do. However, YARN-2209 has
introduced another case which I'm not quite sure about, which is kind of *logic
incompatibility*.

In detail, an ApplicationMasterProtocol API is going to throw an exception
which is not expected before. The exception is a sub-class of
YarnException, such that it doesn't need any method signature change, and
won't break any binary/source compatibility. However, the exception is not
expected before, but needs to be treated specially at the AM side. Not
being aware of the newly introduced exception, the existing YARN
applications' AM may not handle it exception properly, and is at the risk
of being broken on a new YARN cluster after this change.

An additional thought around this problem is that the change of what
exception is to throw under what situation may be considered as a *soft *method
signature change, because we're supposed to write this javadoc to tell the
users (though we didn't it well in Hadoop), and users refer to it to guide
how to handle the exception.

In a more generalized form, let's assume we have a method, which behaves as
A, in release 1.0. However, in release 2.0, the method signature has kept
the same, while its behavior is altered from A to B. A and B are different
behaviors. In this case, do we consider it as an incompatible change?

I think it's somewhat a common issue, such that I raise it on the mailing
list. Please share your ideas.

Thanks,
Zhijie

-- 
Zhijie Shen
Hortonworks Inc.
http://hortonworks.com/

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