Re: platform compatibility policy

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Colm Smyth <Colm Smyth ireland sun com> writes: 
> There was some discussion earlier about which interface enhancements
> should be allowed in micro and minor version changes. I think that
> so long as the enhancement in no way breaks compatibility, it does
> not matter what changes arise. 

I would say the issue is not the relationship of interface
enhancements to the version numbers, but rather the relationship of
them to the release cycles. i.e. any large changes need to be
thoroughly peer-reviewed, the APIs tried out in apps, and we need them
to go through a QA process. At the moment we put out bugfix releases
with very little QA, and rely on making only tiny bugfix-size changes
to ensure stability.

So the real issue for me is to be sure interfaces don't get added
without going through a release process. We don't have any way to make
sure an interface is high-quality and stable otherwise, at least not
for now. The release process for bugfix releases isn't long enough or
rigorous enough to QA major code changes.

Havoc