On 8-Jan-06, at 5:27 PM, Ron Teitelbaum wrote:
>
> I like the goal that everything that is available works with the  
> current
> released version.
[snip]
>
> I like the goal that everything that is new works with what was old.
[snip]
>
> I like the goal of adding more documentation into our code.
[snip]
>
> As a user I would like to be able to have my code work with new  
> versions so
> that I can continue to benefit from the hard work of the  
> community.  It
> doesn't have to go to the level complete painless backward  
> compatibility,
> but it should be good enough and communicated well enough so that I  
> don't
> find out about a problem in production systems, by way of an angry  
> phone
> call from a customer.
I like those aims too but there is one rather big problem in the way;  
who is going to pay for that decidedly non-trivial amount of work?

To make 'everything that is available works with the current '  
requires the owners of every package to promptly update their code  
with every release, and to maintain it so that either the one version  
works with all those previous release or to maintain several  
versions. That's a lot of work for many people.

Of course, if these are really important matters to your business  
then perhaps your business plan should include paying a few people to  
do some of the work needed to achieve them?  We did a fair bit of  
that at Interval, exobox and now, Sophie.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: MAW: Make Aggravating Whine