On Thu, Sep 13, 2018 at 10:24 AM Branko Čibej <br...@apache.org> wrote:
> On 13.09.2018 17:11, Julian Foad wrote: > > Julian Foad wrote: > >> [...] Are we saying now > >> that they need not be specifically marked if we feel they are pretty > >> safe? If we say that, then marking specific APIs as "experimental" in a > >> regular release signifies only that we consider them more experimental > >> (less stable) than others. > >> > >> That might be fine. Anyone developing against a regular release is > >> necessarily developing against new (experimental) APIs, so maybe no > >> explicit warning mechanism is necessary. > > I have gone ahead with producing a release candidate 1.11.0-rc1 with > things just as they are. It currently seems OK to me. If we decide we need > to change this, we can. > > > I've been thinking about this idea of having different compatibility > rules for LTS and regular releases. For 18 years now we've promised and > maintained fairly simple rules of API and ABI compatibility; so much so > that they're implied in and used by our own code. I've come to the > conclusion that changing these rules just because we're changing how > many releases we support would be a very bad idea indeed. > Being absent from that discussion ... oh geez. No no no... I agree with Brane above. It is confusing, and if people mistakenly mix/match releases things will Just Break. Mysteriously. And horribly. And possibly data-destructively. And in 18 years, we've never allowed for API/ABI breakage. Never. We've been able to be hard-core with our compatibility guarantees for 18 years. Why stop? -g
