On Thu, Sep 12, 2024 at 8:34 PM Josh McKenzie <jmcken...@apache.org> wrote: > I'm not advocating for us having a rigid principled stance where we reject > all nuance and don't discuss things. I'm advocating for us coalescing on a > shared default stance of correctness unless otherwise excepted. We know we're > a diverse group, we're all different people with different histories / values > / opinions / cultures, and I think that's what makes this community as > effective as it is. > > But I don't think it's healthy for us to repeatedly re-litigate whether data > loss is acceptable based on how long it's been around, or how frequently some > of us on the project have observed some given phenomenon. My gut tells me > we'd all be in a better place if we all started from 0 on a discussion like > this as "Ok, data loss is unacceptable. Unless otherwise warranted, we should > do all we can to fix this on all supported branches as our default response".
I think this absolutely makes sense in situations where things are clear cut and just need to be corrected, like an off-by-one error. We discover the problem, we fix it. However, the current situation is not that. You say age is not relevant, and though that may be true for the age of the bug (which is before my time!), I do think it's relevant that we've known about this (documented by the ticket) for at least 7 years, but only now have decided to address it. Furthermore, this isn't a straight correction, from the very beginning a possible tradeoff with availability in some circumstances was mentioned. We are talking about changing behavior on top of a 200k delta in ~4k lines of code across a significant amount of files, and doing so in the 13th minor release of a 4 year old major, for a problem we have known about long enough to have put this in all current major releases. I don't think painting the picture with the "data loss" brush alone tells us everything we need to know to make that kind of commitment to what is now our old stable branch. That said, I want to thank Scott and others who provided helpful context here. I still think it is in the realm of possibility that changing behavior can cause a problem for an existing user, and they will be right to be angry if that happens, but that is an easier pill to swallow if we are possibly preventing data loss that is easier to encounter than previously thought. I support doing this in all the current branches. Kind Regards, Brandon
