On Feb 26, 2005, at 11:51 AM, Ceki Gülcü wrote:
Mark,
Over the years, I have always strived to listen to all the opinions voiced. I also try to accommodate opinions diverging from mine and when it boils down to a matter of taste, I tend to privilege the opinions of others over my own. Certainly, there are examples that go both ways.
From a more general perspective, we have to ask ourselves how we want to see the log4j code evolve. One approach, apparently advocated Curt, consists of religiously preserving 100% and absolute backward compatibility. In my opinion such an absolutist approach leads to either stagnation or to code so convoluted as to be unmaintainable.
All I have been advocating is that breaking changes require discussion and voting. I think 100% would be desirable.
Breaking compatibility, even in small ways, causes trouble and headaches. Naturally, non-compatible changes elicit opposition. However, in log4j 1.3, we are facing problems related to the behavior of appenders when they are in an erroneous state. My changes are intended to address this problem. I tried to explain my point of view to Curt over the phone for quite almost an hour. We seemed to have reached an agreement but one which did not survive the night.
I did not feel that my commits after our conversation were inconsistent with the conversation. I don't recall a change of heart or thinking that I said one thing and did another. You had pointed out that the isActive() checks within the doAppend (which had been commented out to allow Hivemind to pass its tests) were essential for the healthy operation of the internal appenders, so I attempted to restore that code without breaking Hivemind and also restore the test code that I commented out when Appender was reverted.
I did feel that your reversion of those changes and the reinstatement of the new methods to Appender was inappropriate. Even if you disagreed, there was no immediate need to revert since my changes posed no immediate danger to the code base. Apparently, we have different recollections of that phone call.
Obviously, you could not have known this when you wrote your comments.
Your words are quite harsh but I guess it goes with the territory. Keeping everyone happy is not exactly a piece of cake.
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