Apologies if this ends up as a duplicate. The list server seems to be,
or have been, down, so trying to re-send and see what happens.
On 06/06/2016 14:38, Christoph Becker wrote:
In my opinion it would be good to more explicitly clarify what
constitutes an unacceptable BC break. Bug fixes are allowed, but even
those sometimes cause a BC break (as a programmer may rely on the buggy
behavior).
Indeed, there is the famous xkcd cartoon highlighting that every change
breaks somebody's expectations, and there is sometimes a grey area
between clear bugs and unintended behaviour that is nonetheless unwise
to change. There are also times when breaking compatibility is justified
because the cost of doing so is low - e.g. the behaviour being changed
is a rare edge case; or because the cost of *not* changing is high -
e.g. fixing a major security flaw.
I think a case could be made for this change falling into the "cost of
change is low" category, but am disappointed that the RFC itself makes
no such case, and nor did there seem to be much engagement when it was
raised on the pre-vote thread.
I'm also not convinced that such a justification would be in the spirit
of the release process RFC. If the intent of the "no BC breaks in minor
releases" policy is to make upgrades smoother, then producing fatal
errors on code that previously ran without error seems like exactly what
we should be avoiding.
I know that people SHOULD be fixing these incidences where they are
producing Warnings currently, but that doesn't mean we can assume that
they DO. This change has the same kind of implications as the removal of
call-time pass-by-reference in 5.4, and I thought that was exactly what
we didn't want to repeat.
Frankly, if this passes, as it currently looks set to do, I think the BC
policy in the Release Process RFC should be officially abandoned or
rewritten, because we will no longer be able to tell users "if it runs
under 7.0, it will run under 7.1".
Regards,
--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]
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