"Bernt M. Johnsen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > So, the question is then: Is this a Derby 10 release, or should it > really be Derby 11? > > Myself, I have no strong feelings, but wanted to raise the discussion.
Me neither, but here are my observations: 1) Derby's charter doesn't mention backward compatibility (or forward compatibility) at all 2) It has been argued that backward compatibility is implied by the "easy to use" requirement, but I think this discussion shows this to be inadequate. Clearly, both "secure by default" and "backward comatibility" could be seen as ease of use features (The charter only says "Secure". It doesn't mention "secure by default"). But which ease of use feature is more important? I think the implicit "backward compatibility" requirement and its importance relative to other requirements should be added to the charter. 3) As far as I can tell (from the Derby website), the idea that an incompatibility is OK iff you bump the major version number has not been formally accepted/ratified by the Derby community. David van Couvering has written a Wiki page about this, http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/ForwardCompatibility#head-fb84926793e6687822e8397203265a6497911efe which (in my interpretation) suggests that requiring the -unsecure option is an INCOMPATIBLE change to a STABLE interface, and that this should only be allowed when changing the major version number. However, this wiki page has numerous disclaimers which state that this is "just a draft" and "work in progress". If there has been a vote on this, it is not recorded on http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/VoteResults According to nabble the last discussion about this seems to be http://www.nabble.com/-PRE-VOTE-DISCUSSION--Compatibility-rules-and-interface-table-tf1782536.html#a4854300 which doesn't seem to reach a consensus. There doesn't seem to be any major disagreement though... -- dt
