From: Bastien <bzg@gnu.org>
To: Adam Porter <adam@alphapapa.net>
Cc: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Policy proposal: Do not move existing functions/macros except in major version increments
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2020 00:59:10 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87a71ms88x.fsf@gnu.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAO_b3FWp9NXDgn8PutUb0zv=veNid57ysu-TW8a6rjZywQTW=A@mail.gmail.com> (Adam Porter's message of "Mon, 1 Jun 2020 13:07:23 -0500")
Hi Adam,
Adam Porter <adam@alphapapa.net> writes:
> I mostly agree with you. My request is simply that, when a change
> has the potential to break third-party packages, and it's a change,
> such as this one, that mostly moves code around for organizational
> purposes, that it be delayed until the next major version.
IIRC this was the case for the change that triggered your first email,
it was in master, no?
> My goal for such a policy would be to reduce the frequency of such
> changes that third-party package authors have to write compatibility
> code for. The (if (version< org-version ...)) workarounds become
> confusing for authors and users, and somewhat of a maintenance
> burden.
I understand the burden. We don't really follow the conventions of
semantic versioning. We use "x.y.z" versions with z being for bugfix
releases and both y and x for... the rest.
Because we are slow at releasing so-called minor releases, they end up
containing some changes that users and developers should be aware of.
Hence the need to let them know about such changes. I don't think
using a policy will help here, because definitions of "breaking" may
vary: is a change in a function's signature always a breaking change?
For every function? Or just for core functions? If so, which ones?
(See the many discussions in the npm universe about what to consider
a breaking change and worth a major release.)
In a word: even though stricter rules could somehow help, I do think
the main issue is about *communication*, not conventions.
> That's a very clever way to do it! Thanks for your work on this.
Thanks, I hope it will be useful.
> If
> it's feasible, you might also consider allowing committers to put such
> a header in the git commit log and parsing it out of that, which could
> make it even easier.
The idea is that updates that are important enough to be listed on
updates.orgmode.org are the ones that *should* be somehow announced on
the mailing list. If we let updates.orgmode.org monitor commits, then
people who are only reading the list will miss updates (which we
don't want, I think.)
That said, it would be nice to have a function that checks the data
from https://updates.orgmode.org/data/updates and warn the user when
there is a new upcoming change.
--
Bastien
prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-06-01 22:59 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-04-17 2:16 Policy proposal: Do not move existing functions/macros except in major version increments Adam Porter
2020-04-17 9:03 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2020-04-23 3:03 ` Adam Porter
2020-04-23 11:26 ` Nicolas Goaziou
2020-06-01 15:11 ` Bastien
2020-06-01 18:07 ` Adam Porter
2020-06-01 22:59 ` Bastien [this message]
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
List information: https://www.orgmode.org/
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=87a71ms88x.fsf@gnu.org \
--to=bzg@gnu.org \
--cc=adam@alphapapa.net \
--cc=emacs-orgmode@gnu.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this public inbox
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/org-mode.git
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).