Re: stabilization & number of changes

On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 11:00:03AM -0500, mark benedetto king wrote:
>...
> You're right; there are hoardes of people waiting for 1.0 to adopt svn.
> I'm one of them. The cost of an API change is probably proportional
> to the number of users; let's try to injure only the early adopters,
> rather than the masses.

One of my underlying reasons for avoiding API changes right now is that
you can view the set of available software as a sort of "ecosphere" of
tools around SVN. If we change the API now, then it ripples throughout
that entire ecosphere and tightly couples versions of each against each
other. If we tweak the API, then suddently RapidSVN no longer works. The
user will have to upgrade that. Oh, and their buddy's Windows box will
need a new TortoiseSVN to deal with the new SVN. etc.

It would be great if we could just tweak the API, but it affects a lot
more than just SVN itself.

Post-1.0, we'd be making those tweaks in a compatible fashion, so it
wouldn't really matter. We wouldn't see this kind of coupling (what'll
happen is that a new client might force a point-upgrade of the core SVN
rather than the other way around). But right now, we're looking at making
the tweaks incompatibly (note: across the board rather than just the date
parser).

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
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