Re: API review for 1.11; do we need to mark new APIs as experimental?

On Sat, Sep 15, 2018 at 8:48 AM Greg Stein <gstein_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>...

> No no no... I agree with Brane above. It is confusing, and if people
> mistakenly mix/match releases things will Just Break. Mysteriously. And
> horribly. And possibly data-destructively.
>

To clarify the above a bit:

Consider if the mid-LTS had an entrypoint with 3 parameters, so a client
coded to that to (also) experiment with the feature set. So Alan has got
his client installed, trying out this new "shelve" feature, running against
the mid-LTS release that has been on the system for the past year.

The following week, Brian, his system administrator upgrades to the LTS
release, for the admin's sanity. "What? LTS releases? YAY! Less work for
me."

In the LTS, the entrypoint takes 5 parameters. So the function reads wonky
stuff from the stack. Hilarity ensues.

Brian now gets a call from Alan: "I was working with $client, doing all my
normal Subversion work. But now it seems that my working copy is corrupted.
What happened?"

The hilarity ends. Alan is told he can't use his nifty client. Alan gets
angry. Brian bangs his head on his desk, and wonders how 18 years of random
Subversion upgrades were always safe. But not this week. Why did it break
this week? And it was an LTS release!?! Why....

Cheers,
-g
Received on 2018-09-16 11:17:14 CEST