On Jan 22, 2008, at 3:45 PM, Chris Hostetter wrote:
Perhaps the crux of the issue is that we as a community need to become
more willing to crank out "major" releases ... if we just released
3.0 and
now someone came up with the "Magic" field type and it's really
magically
and we want to start using it but it's not backwards compatibly --
well i
guess are next release just needs to be called 4.0 then ... it's clear
from the version number that this is a significant change, evne if
it does
wind up getting released 3 months after v3.0
To paraphrase a dead English guy: A rose by any other name is still
the same, right?
Basically, all the version number tick saves them from is having to
read the CHANGES file, right?
To some extent, I am proposing that we clean out the cruft once a
year. Consider it spring cleaning. If we want to mark it as a major
version, I am fine with that. Basically, if history is any
indication, this would mean our releases will look like (given our
avg. 6 mos release cycle):
3.0
3.1
4.0
4.1
5.0
5.1
Thus, the version numbers become meaningless; the question is what do
we see as best for Lucene? We could just as easily call it Lucene
Summer '08 and Lucene Winter '08. Heck, we could pull the old MS Word
2.0 to MS Word 6.0 and jump to Lucene 6.0 next, too, for all I care.
I think 1 year is plenty long to keep both user Group B and C happy (A
will be oblivious). Once a year cleanup of code, in my mind is not
too burdensome for those in Group C. I consider myself in Group C,
for most tools I use (Lucene is probably the exception) and I can't
recall the last time I had an application that uses Lucene like stuff
that I haven't touched in over a year. But even for those other
tools, I expect that I am going to have a major upgrade once a year.
In fact, it is often part of the license agreement from commercial
companies and I would feel cheated if I didn't get it.
I think one could even argue that Group C would be happier w/ more
frequent removals of cruft, since it can be handled in a more
incremental way, versus an all at once upgrade every 2 years. They
have the option of how big of a chunk to bite off.
-Grant
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