On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 12:06 AM, Marvin Humphrey
<mar...@rectangular.com> wrote:
> Essentially, we're free to break back compat within "Lucy" at any time, but
> we're not able to break back compat within a stable fork like "Lucy1",
> "Lucy2", etc. So what we'll probably do during normal development with
> Analyzers is just change them and note the break in the Changes file.
So... what if we change up how we develop and release Lucene:
* A major release always bumps the major release number (2.x ->
3.0), and, starts a new branch for all minor (3.1, 3.2, 3.3)
releases along that branch
* There is no back compat across major releases (index nor APIs),
but full back compat within branches.
This would match how many other projects work (KS/Lucy, as Marvin
describes above; Apache Tomcat; Hibernate; log4J; FreeBSD; etc.).
The 'stable' branch (say 3.x now for Lucene) would get bug fixes, and,
if any devs have the itch, they could freely back-port improvements
from trunk as long as they kept back-compat within the branch.
I think in such a future world, we could:
* Remove Version entirely!
* Not worry at all about back-compat when developing on trunk
* Give proper names to new improved classes instead of
StandardAnalzyer2, or SmartStandardAnalyzer, that we end up doing
today; rename existing classes.
* Let analyzers freely, incrementally improve
* Use interfaces without fear
* Stop spending the truly substantial time (look @ Uwe's awesome
back-compat layer for analyzers!) that we now must spend when
adding new features, for back-compat
* Be more free to introduce very new not-fully-baked features/APIs,
marked as experimental, on the expectation that once they are used
(in trunk) they will iterate/change/improve vs trying so hard to
get things right on the first go for fear of future back compat
horrors.
Thoughts...?
Mike
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