Re: [RFC2] Handling Backwards Compatibility in PEAR

On 20 Sep 2003 at 11:32, Greg Beaver wrote: > Stefan Neufeind wrote: > > > On 20 Sep 2003 at 12:39, Alexey Borzov wrote: > > > > > >>Stefan Neufeind wrote: > >> > >> > >>>This is not what we discussed, right? This way you can't have a 2.x > >>>and 3.0 co-exist on a system. For sure this should be no problem on > >>>a computer you're working on - but it might become a problem in > >>>webhosting-environments. > >> > >>Lets say this loudly: if you want to fully control your environment, > >>you'll need to keep a private copy of PEAR. If you are using a > >>hosting that does not allow this, tough luck. You get what you pay > >>for, generally. > > > > > > Agreed. But you can't say "well, your provider upgraded and now the > > app doesn't run anymore? your problem.". That's not possible. And as > > a provider you will always get questions like "was the update > > necessary" and "everything ran fine - so why did you update" etc. > > This fear is rendered unnecessary by two requirements: > > 1) BC is always maintained in minor version upgrades (btw Alexey, your > clarification is great, can you forward to Lukas?) > > 2) users can only rely upon public elements, and these will continue > to work as documented, so the only breakage that is possible is due to > a bug, and therefore if a bug exists, pear revert can be used, the bug > reported on pear.php.net, a new release made, and voila, problem is > solved. Well, if we (Alexey and me) mis-understood each other *that* much then Greg you're right ... and my apologize go to Alexey for mis- understanding him. The way I understood Alexey was that "a complete API break" or "complete rewrite" would require a new major version. But "minor breaks" could be solved also inside the same major version. And that's what lead me to the point of thinking "hmm, renaming a function is only a minor break so he didn't want to bump the major version so users might get into problems". Alexey, again, if I got you *that* much wrong, apologize. But it's interesting to see how angry (?) such a discussion can get from one reply to the other ... maybe we all are a bit too work-overloaded from time to time. (I know this discussion bugs everybody, discussing things again and again. But hopefully we'll find a good conclusion soon that we can all agree upon.) Stefan