On 20.04.2010, at 14:17, Casimiro de Almeida Barreto wrote:
> 
> Em 20-04-2010 06:04, Bert Freudenberg escreveu:
>> (...)
>> Well, maybe I misunderstood the question, but I expect to see changes in trunk that you would not want to see in 4.1. It's our current stable release (btw, someone should update Wikipedia) so if packages are posted to the 4.1 repository, they would not simply be taken from trunk. They would be carefully selected, high-impact fixes only.
>> 
>> 
> Most things in trunk are enhancements, updates and fixes. Perhaps
> enhancements won't go to 4.1 if they're found inconvenient or useless
> but till now I haven't seen back steps. I see trunk as a kind of
> Fedora's rawhide and I understand that I will eventually find alpha/beta
> stuff stuff inside that will be replaced in next updates. That's not a
> problem for me.
>> I guess I don't know what "compatibility" means in this discussion ...
>> 
> Among other things, compatibility means that something was present
> before updates and disappear after them (missing/renamed
> methods/messages for instance) so packages that were working just stop
> to do so. Changes in behavior also impact compatibility.

It could well be that methods that were deprecated before are finally removed in trunk. We cannot promise full backwards-compitibility forever, otherwise we would have no chance of ever getting a cleaner system.

What would help immensely is if we could define what APIs we consider to be stable and supported. These need to be documented, and changes would need to be documented for each new release too.

Maybe that's what Casey signed up for? ;)

- Bert -