On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 7:00 PM, Yonik Seeley<yo...@lucidimagination.com> wrote: > I'm starting to feel like the lone holdout that thinks back compat for > commonly used interfaces and index formats is important. So I'll sum > up some of my thoughts and leave it at that: > > - I doubt that the number of new users for each release of Lucene > exceeds the sum total of all existing users of Lucene. Lucene is > already the dominant open source search library, so we're never going > to hit that type of exponential growth going forward. Existing users > are very important. > - Good back compat makes the lives of all Lucene users easier > - Good back compat makes the lives of Lucene developers easier in some > ways also. We don't *need* to go back and patcholder releases, since > we can say "use a newer release". If things change too much, that > will no longer be an easy option for many users, and more people will > get stuck in the past because upgrading is too painful. > - The difficulty of change can also be a good thing - it forces people > to really think if changes are worth it and only add them where it > really makes sense. I have been around since 1.4 and looking back from today I assume it is/was worth all the pain. Being able to not looking at lucene for 1 1/2 years and using it again without thinking too much about what has changed is a huge advantage!
On the other hand, I really appreciate the decision of the Python community moving forward and getting rid of legacy code, functions, interfaces etc. in P3K. Each time you decide to take such a step you will be in the same situation with back compatibility. I would not change the policy and rather go a similar way as the python community went with p3k. A clean cut can have major advantages but after breaking compatibility keep on sticking to the policy is a must I guess. the bad thing about APIs is that you have only one chance to get it right. I did not follow the thread about back compat at all so if that has been proposed / discussed just ignore it. > > The last threads on back compat generated so much volume that I > couldn't keep up, and I expect there are many others that couldn't > either. I'm not personally interested in discussing it in the > abstract further... I'm more interested in actual code > patches/proposals. > > -Yonik > http://www.lucidimagination.com > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: java-dev-unsubscr...@lucene.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: java-dev-h...@lucene.apache.org > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: java-dev-unsubscr...@lucene.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: java-dev-h...@lucene.apache.org
