[Seaside] backwards compatibility vs. progress

Avi Bryant seaside@lists.squeakfoundation.org
Wed, 26 Jun 2002 13:03:33 -0700 (PDT)


Just a general philosophical question (maintainer angst, if you will).
I'm struggling with the mythical 0.94 release, trying to shoehorn various
agendas into it: my desire to separate the template system from the rest
of the core and make programmatic html generation feasible, the need to
simplify the bindings system, features that have been requested like
dynamic/polymorphic subcomponents, and so on.  Since each of these changes
tends to break existing code anyway, the temptation is becoming stronger
to just "burn the diskpacks" and start fresh on a new implementation of
Seaside that takes what I've learned and reshapes it to better accomodate
these and other features.  What I don't know is how this would affect
everyone else: some of you are deploying applications, some of you are
working on ports to other dialects, etc.  How important is a smooth
migration from version to version, versus a clean, fresh design?

Obviously the first step is to just release 0.94; the question is where to
go after that.

All comments much appreciated.

Cheers,
Avi