Michael McCandless wrote:
On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 2:27 PM, DM Smith <dmsmith...@gmail.com> wrote:
Marvin Humphrey wrote:
I feel the opposite: I'd like new users to see improvements by
default, and users that require strict back-compate to ask for that.
By "strict back-compat", do you mean "people who would like their search
app to
not fail silently"? ;) A "new user" who follows your advice...
// haha stupid noob StandardAnalyzer analyzer = new
StandardAnalyzer(Versons.LATEST);
... is going to get screwed when the default tokenization behavior
changes.
And it would be much worse if we follow my preference for making the arg
optional without following my preference for keeping defaults intact:
// haha eat it luser StandardAnalyzer analyzer = new
StandardAnalyzer();
It's either make the arg mandatory when changing default behavior and
recommend that new users pass a fixed argument, or make it optional but
keep
defaults intact between major releases.
I think I see your point: A new user is such only for the first release that
they use Lucene. For a first use, there is no backward compatibility
problem. On the use of a subsequent release, their code still gets the
latest and greatest and now by the choice they were guided to make, they may
have broken backward compatibility.
So for any user, the only save, thus acceptable use is to never have
Versions.LATEST, but only a specific version.
Right, we would have to not provide Versions.LATEST, ie if you want
latest, you'd pick Versions.LUCENE_29 (in 2.9).
Why go to all this trouble for a new user?
Let's pretend that there are 1,000 new users every release. After 12
releases, there are still only 1000 new users but now 11000 old users.
How does it help an old user?
Those 11000 old users now have to update their code to
Versions.Lucene_301 (or whatever the latest is) to get the latest
changes, but they are also going to have to understand what that means
and figure out what parts of their application now behave in a broken
manner. Where are they to go to find out that info? CHANGES.txt?
When I was a new user, I had to look at example code, read faqs, wiki,
javadoc, java-users .... It was a learning curve, fortunately not steep.
Don't those resources need to be maintained so as to match the
best/recommended practices? Can't that be the place where new users are
informed?
-- DM
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