Hi Adam, Adam Porter <a...@alphapapa.net> writes:
> I mostly agree with you. My request is simply that, when a change > has the potential to break third-party packages, and it's a change, > such as this one, that mostly moves code around for organizational > purposes, that it be delayed until the next major version. IIRC this was the case for the change that triggered your first email, it was in master, no? > My goal for such a policy would be to reduce the frequency of such > changes that third-party package authors have to write compatibility > code for. The (if (version< org-version ...)) workarounds become > confusing for authors and users, and somewhat of a maintenance > burden. I understand the burden. We don't really follow the conventions of semantic versioning. We use "x.y.z" versions with z being for bugfix releases and both y and x for... the rest. Because we are slow at releasing so-called minor releases, they end up containing some changes that users and developers should be aware of. Hence the need to let them know about such changes. I don't think using a policy will help here, because definitions of "breaking" may vary: is a change in a function's signature always a breaking change? For every function? Or just for core functions? If so, which ones? (See the many discussions in the npm universe about what to consider a breaking change and worth a major release.) In a word: even though stricter rules could somehow help, I do think the main issue is about *communication*, not conventions. > That's a very clever way to do it! Thanks for your work on this. Thanks, I hope it will be useful. > If > it's feasible, you might also consider allowing committers to put such > a header in the git commit log and parsing it out of that, which could > make it even easier. The idea is that updates that are important enough to be listed on updates.orgmode.org are the ones that *should* be somehow announced on the mailing list. If we let updates.orgmode.org monitor commits, then people who are only reading the list will miss updates (which we don't want, I think.) That said, it would be nice to have a function that checks the data from https://updates.orgmode.org/data/updates and warn the user when there is a new upcoming change. -- Bastien
