----- Original Message ----- > From: "Aurélien Bénel" <[email protected]> > I’m just a « user »… a very dedicated and passionated user (I’m in > the top 10% on StackOverflow about CouchDB and I taught CouchDB to > more than 150 french software engineers), but a user. That’s why I > never subscribed to the « dev » mailing list (or for a very short > period of time). I now understand that I should have, but it’s too > late.
At Apache, all people with an opinion are entitled to express that opinion and, where appropriate, have it considered by the community. Naturally we'd like to have consensus on all decisions we make, but ultimately some more controversial decisions have to be voted upon. Only acknowledged and accredited project committers can vote in those decisions. The policy for this is summarized in our project bylaws at https://couchdb.apache.org/bylaws.html and clear guidelines are presented. Of course, it is best for us to listen to all users who use the software. But many of us who develop and manage Apache CouchDB with commercial interest have more experience with CouchDB than you do, have dealt with orders of magnitude more users and developers than you have, and thus have a more intimate understanding of the poor design decisions made nearly 10 years ago now. 10 years is an epoch, given the advancement of technology. The project needs to evolve, not just because the world has moved on from CGI-style web server implementations, but because we have found more fruitful design choices that play to our strengths. Ultimately, this means some API endpoints will be deprecated, and some new endpoints will be introduced - just like other long-lived projects that have had to make similar decisions. That exact list will be hammered out on the dev@ mailing list over the next several months and will be widely communicated. > My frustration is as high as has been my passion for six years for > this incredibly interesting project. > I respect the board decisions but now I will have a hard time finding > money (which is sparse in academic research) to move all of our > software to a different technology stack and arguments to explain to > all of my collaborators that I bet on a technology stack that got > rapidly deprecated. CouchDB 1.x and 2.x will forever support everything you see in the API today, though deprecation announcements may be forthcoming on certain calls for the 3.x and future releases. I'm positive there will be people continuing to use 1.x/2.x for another 10 years; there is absolutely no reason to migrate off of those versions if your needs are satisfied there. As examples, I still know people using perl 4, python 2, Oracle 10.x, Linux 2.x. The community will continue to embrace and support older CouchDB versions as long as it is practical to do so. > Thank you for your understanding. And you for yours. -Joan
