We will chat about this in the upcoming community sync (thursday 3 PM). So,
please make sure to attend if you are interested.

On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 3:44 PM, Yan Xu <xuj...@apple.com> wrote:

>
> On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 3:37 PM, Yan Xu <xuj...@apple.com> wrote:
>
>> Thanks Alex for starting this!
>>
>> In addition to comments below, I think it'll be helpful to keep the
>> existing versioning doc concise and user-friendly while having a dedicated
>> doc for the "implementation details" where precise requirements and
>> procedures go. Maybe some duplication/cross-referencing is needed but Mesos
>> developers will find the latter much more helpful while the users/framework
>> developer will find the former easy to read.
>>
>> e.g., a similar split:
>> https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/docs/api.md
>> https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/docs/de
>> vel/api_changes.md (which has a lot of details on how the kubernetes
>> community is thinking about similar issues, which we can learn from)
>>
>> Jiang Yan Xu 
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 9:34 AM, Alex Rukletsov <a...@mesosphere.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Folks,
>>>
>>> There have been a bunch of online [1, 2] and offline discussions about
>>> our
>>> deprecation and versioning policy. I found that people—including
>>> myself—read the versioning doc [3] differently; moreover some aspects are
>>> not captured there. I would like to start a discussion around this topic
>>> by
>>> sharing my confusions and suggestions. This will hopefully help us stay
>>> on
>>> the same page and have similar expectations. The second goal is to
>>> eliminate ambiguities from the versioning doc (thanks Vinod for
>>> volunteering to update it).
>>>
>>
>> +1 Let me know if there are things I can help with.
>>
>>
>>>
>>> 1. API vs. semantic changes.
>>> Current versioning guide treat features (e.g. flags, metrics, endpoints)
>>> and API differently: incompatible changes for the former are allowed
>>> after
>>> 6 month deprecation cycle, while for the latter they require bumping a
>>> major version. I suggest we consolidate these policies.
>>>
>>
>> I feel that the distinction is not API vs. semantic changes, Backwards
>> compatible API guarantee should imply backwards compatible semantics (of
>> the API).
>> i.e., if a change in API doesn't cause the message to be dropped to the
>> floor but leads to behavior change that causes problems in the system, it
>> still breaks compatibility.
>>
>> IMO the distinction is more between:
>> - Compatibility between components that are impossible/very unpleasant to
>> upgrade in lockstep - high priority for compatibility guarantee.
>> - Compatibility between components that are generally bundled (modules)
>> or things that usually aren't built into automated tooling (e.g., the
>> /state endpoint) - more relaxed for now but we should explicitly exclude
>> them from the guarantee.
>>
>>
>>>
>>> We should also define and clearly explain what changes require bumping
>>> the
>>> major version. I have no strong opinion here and would love to hear what
>>> people think. The original motivation for maintaining backwards
>>> compatibility is to make sure vN schedulers can correctly work with vN
>>> API
>>> without being updated. But what about semantic changes that do not touch
>>> the API? For example, what if we decide to send less task health updates
>>> to
>>> schedulers based on some health policy? It influences the flow of task
>>> status updates, should such change be considered compatible? Taking it to
>>> an extreme, we may not even be able to fix some bugs because someone may
>>> already rely on this behaviour!
>>>
>>
>> API changes should warrant a major version bump. Also the API is not just
>> what the machine reads but all the documentation associated with it, right?
>> It depends on what the documentation says; what the user _should_ expect.
>>
>> That said, I feel that these things are hard to be talked about in the
>> abstract. Even with a guideline, we still need to make case-by-case
>> decisions. (e.g., has the documentation precisely defined this precise
>> behavior? If not, is it reasonable for the users to expect some behavior
>> because it's common sense? How bad is it if some behavior just changes a
>> tiny bit?) Therefore we need to make sure the process for API changes are
>> more rigorously defined.
>>
>> Whether something is a bug depends on whether the API does what it says
>> it'll do. The line may sometimes be blurry but in general I don't feel it's
>> a problem. If someone is relying on the behavior that is a bug, we should
>> still help them fix it but the bug shouldn't count as "our guarantee".
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Another tightly related thing we should explicitly call out is
>>> upgradability and rollback capabilities inside a major release.
>>> Committing
>>> to this may significantly limit what we can change within a major
>>> release;
>>> on the other side it will give users more time and a better experience
>>> about using and maintaining Mesos clusters.
>>>
>>
>> According to the versioning doc upgradability depends on whether you
>> depend on deprecated/removed features.
>>
>> That paragraph should be explained more precisely:
>> - "deprecated" means your system won't break but warnings are shown
>> (Maybe we should use some standard deprecation warning keywords so the
>> operator can monitor the log for such warnings!
>> - "removed": means it may break.
>>
>> If you deprecate a flag/env that interface with operator tooling in the
>> next minor release, the operator basically has 6 months from the next minor
>> release to change the her tooling. I feel this is pretty acceptable.
>> If you deprecate a flag/env variable that interface with the framework
>> (executor) in the next minor release, I feel it may not be enough and it
>> probably warrants a major version bump. So perhaps the API shouldn't be
>> just the protos.
>>
>>
>>> 2. Versioned vs. unversioned protobufs.
>>> Currently we have v1 and unnamed protobufs, which simultaneously mean v0,
>>> v2, and internal. I am sometimes confused about what is the right way to
>>> update or introduce a field or message there, do people feel the same?
>>> How
>>> about splitting the unnamed version into explicit v0, v2, and internal?
>>>
>>
>> As haosdent mentioned, we have captured this in MESOS-6268. The benefit
>> is clear but I guess the people will be more motivated when we find some v2
>> feature can't be made compatible with the v0 API. (Anand's point
>> in MESOS-6016). On the other hand, if we cut v0 API access before that
>> happens (is v0 API obsolete and should be removed 6 months after 1.0?) then
>> we don't need to worry about v0 and can use unversioned protos as
>> "internal"?
>>
>>
>>> Food for thought. It would be great if we can only maintain "diffs" to
>>> the
>>> internal protobufs in the code, instead of duplicating them altogether.
>>>
>>> 3. API and feature labelling.
>>> I suggest to introduce explicit labels for API and features, to ensure
>>> users have the right assumptions about the their lifetime while engineers
>>> have the ability to change a wip feature in an non-compatible way. I
>>> propose the following:
>>> API: stable, non-stable, pure (not used by Mesos components)
>>> Feature: experimental, normal.
>>>
>>
>>  +1 on formalizing the terminologies.
>>
>> Historically the distinction is not clear for the following:
>>
>> 1. The API has no compatibility guarantee at all.
>> 2. The feature provided by this API is experimental
>>
>
> To add to this point: because 2) logically doesn't apply to the "pure (not
> used by Mesos components)" fields in the API, it could be more confusing
> and thus require more precise definition.
>
>
>>
>> IMO It's OK that we say that we don't distinguish the two (the API has no
>> compatibility guarantee until the feature is fully released) but we have to
>> make it clear.
>> If we don't make such distinction, ALL API additions should be marked as
>> unstable first and be changed stable later (as a formal process).
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Looking forward to your thoughts and suggestions.
>>> AlexR
>>>
>>> [1] https://www.mail-archive.com/user@mesos.apache.org/msg08025.html
>>> [2] https://www.mail-archive.com/dev@mesos.apache.org/msg36621.html
>>> [3]
>>> https://github.com/apache/mesos/blob/b2beef37f6f85a8c75e9681
>>> 36caa7a1f292ba20e/docs/versioning.md
>>>
>>
>>
>

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