RE: [docbook] Policy on backwards incompatible changes

["Johnson, Eric" <Eric.Johnson@iona.com>]

Norman's proposal sounds good to me. More than a year is a long time to
wait for making changes that break backward compatibility.

I think you could do away with the second rule altogether or make it
less stringent:

- The change was announced as part of the planning for the major
release.

Assuming that a major release takes a few months to plan and implement,
you'd still give people a pretty big window to plan for the change.

That also relieves the burden of needing to put out a release simply to
announce a backwardly incompatible change. As written, if there is no
need to release an update prior to a major release, you'd be stuck
making a point release just to make the announcement.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jirka Kosek [mailto:jirka@kosek.cz] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 5:22 PM
To: Norman Walsh
Cc: docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [docbook] Policy on backwards incompatible changes

Norman Walsh wrote:

> After giving it some thought, the following proposal seems like 
> something I could live with:
> 
> * A point release (X.1,X.2,X.1.2, etc.) MUST NOT contain any backwards
>   incompatible changes.
> 
> * A major release MAY contain backwards incompatible changes if both
>   of the following conditions are true:
> 
>   - The change was announced in the release notes for the previous 
>     version (major or minor)
> 
>   - The change was announced in a release that occurred at least six
>     months previously.
> 
> By these rules, we can announce, in V5.1, our plans to make a 
> backwards incompatible change in V6.0. Then, in V6.0, if it's been at 
> least six months since V5.1 was released, we can make the change.

This sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

				Jirka

--
------------------------------------------------------------------
   Jirka Kosek      e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz      http://xmlguru.cz
------------------------------------------------------------------
        Professional XML consulting and training services
   DocBook customization, custom XSLT/XSL-FO document processing
------------------------------------------------------------------
  OASIS DocBook TC member, W3C Invited Expert, ISO JTC1/SC34 member
------------------------------------------------------------------