Hello. Le lun. 17 juil. 2023 à 12:50, Elliotte Rusty Harold <elh...@ibiblio.org> a écrit : > > There are a lot of proposals floating recently to churn the API. I'm > going to move a direct no on all of this. > > Mild improvements in consistency in no way justify any API breakage or > even deprecation.
We routinely do that in every major release. Otherwise it wouldn't be a major release. > Every method and class that currently exists in any > commons library should continue to exist there with the same signature > indefinitely. It does, but in outdated (and often unsupported) older versions. Parties that want it otherwise should provide the necessary resources (e.g. to maintain older versions). > Compatibility is far more important than consistency. There has never been any (intentional) breaking of (binary) compatibility in a minor release. > Do > NOT redesign or rethink the APIs at this late date. Too much depends > on them. That depends on which component(s) you are talking about. and which versions and whether it is "beta" or not. > > New methods, classes, and packages, and projects can be added where > appropriate. Internals can be improved as possible. But what's there > today stays there, absent the very rare case where critical bugs or > security issues require breaking an API. However, that's extremely > uncommon. It has been the "Commons" policy for years. > No API will ever be perfect or free from hindsight. But the cost of > change is too high to justify breaking commons libraries. No one is forced to use the latest versions. > Stare > decisis is as valuable a principle in API design as in law. Not following the advice led to [RNG], [Numbers], [Geometry] and [Statistics], all of which could challenge previous decisions, resulting in better API, more functionality, improved performance, bugs discovery... Regards, Gilles --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
