Folks I would like to have a rough consensus whether or not it is OK to put new features / new APIs in patch releases.
There are several things about adding APIs in patch releases that can potentially cause issues * Those changes do not go through the standard alpha / beta / GA development cycle, which means less testing and almost no feedback * Once released those changes permanently become a part of public APIs * Incompatibility between patch releases can go undetected as Clirr maven plugin is usually configured to test against the feature release (for instance 4.5.x releases get checked against 4.5.0 and API incompatibility in classes and methods added after 4.5.0 will not be detected). Naturally having to drive every trivial API change through the standard alpha / beta / GA development cycle means more overhead, more work and more trouble (primarily for me, as for better or worse I act as a RM for most releases). I have no intention of trying to be more Catholic than the Pope of Rome. It will be perfectly fine for me if we all collectively decide it is not much of a problem, as long as we make this decision explicitly rather than implicitly. Oleg --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
