On Jun 19, 2008, at 11:31 AM, David Reiss wrote:
I think that something as simple as a search-and-replace is fine.
Binary incompatibilities that require a clean rebuild are fine too.
Even changes that require code to be regenerated, while annoying,
are okay, though it would be nice to batch them up, and we should
implement some automatic version-checking first.
Agree.
However, I think that changes that require developers to make
nontrivial changes to their applications and actually *think*
just because they want to upgrade Thrift should be avoided unless
a really solid case can be made for their inclusion. (Either
because they provide a really big benefit, or the number of programs
that have to be re-thought is relatively small.)
Agree.
I know that, as a new Thrift user, you want to mold everything
to fit your expectations, but please have mercy me, who would
be responsible for updating dozens of programs at Facebook to
work with the new version!
Where necessary we can definitely make backwards-compatibility
measures. In general I think most of the changes I have in mind at
the moment are changes of the "find and replace then rebuild" variety.
--David
Bryan Duxbury wrote:
Hey all,
There are a probably a fair number of sweeping changes that need to
be made now that we're in Apache. One amongst those in particular
that I'm thinking about is the task to convert all the
"com.facebook.thrift" packages in java to "org.apache.thrift". As
David has noted, this would be a breaking change for clients.
My question is, in general, during this incubation period, should we
be very interested in maintaining backwards compatibility? I know
that there are existing clients and servers written all over the
place, but that will be true at every stage of our development from
this point onward. However, right now, when we are freshly in the
Apache Incubator, before any official Apache release has been made, I
think we have an opportunity to shake things up quite a bit.
Consumers who download the new release, post-Apache move, will have
to be aware that big things have changed.
What do others think?
-Bryan
