[hibernate-dev] Re: Hibernate ORM 5: end-of-life and upgrading

Imre Jonk via hibernate-dev <[email protected]> Tue, 07 Jun 2022 16:59:08 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.java.hibernate.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On Thu, 2022-06-02 at 07:37 -0500, Steve Ebersole wrote:
> > But in the end, given a large enough userbase, every
> > (documented or undocumented) behavior of an API is being relied
> > upon by someone, meaning that every change will break someone's
> > workflow: https://xkcd.com/1172/
> 
> Extrapolating what you say, we could never fix bugs because that
> buggy behavior is "being relied upon by someone".  I simply reject
> that.  Fairly sure that is not what you are saying, but this has been
> my point throughout this conversation - words are important. 
> Especially when you start talking about expectations across a large
> number of people.

Well I did not say that you "could never fix bugs", just that a bugfix
has a certain probability of being a breaking change for some user out
there. As your userbase grows, that probability approaches 1.

Semantic Versioning actually recognizes this issue: in the
introduction, the authors state that for SemVer to work, you must first
declare a public API, then communicate changes to it using the version
number. That way, a "backwards-compatible bugfix" is truly backwards
compatible for users that strictly implement your public API.

From what I've seen in the documentation, it looks like Hibernate now
has a clear distinction between the public and private API (you
describe this in "Huge Project, Small Team" [1]). So, kudos :)

[1]
https://github.com/hibernate/hibernate-orm/wiki/Huge-Project,-Small-Team#internal

> > I meant that the Hibernate developers once in a while have to
> > say to each other "Let's stop backporting fixes for release series
> > x.y. People have had enough time to upgrade, now let's spend the
> > time we save on things in our roadmap".
> 
> Sure, but that's the thing.  That is reactive, not proactive. 
> Consider the current 5.x -> 6.x situation again... What most people
> who ask this stuff really want is, as soon as 6.0 is released, some
> date when 5.x will become unsupported.  But that is not something we
> are ever going to do - it is impossible.

Yeah, I guess you're right. We'll just have to live with that.

> We are lucky in that we have a wonderful community, many of whom are
> very helpful in the early shake out of these new releases.  E.g., we
> had a lot of testing and feedback of 6.0 well before it went Final.

That indeed sounds very helpful. I wish that my company had the
resources to help out with beta-testing...

> > > As you plan moving to 6.0, definitely check out the Jakarta
> > > Transformer to help automate some of the tedious Java Persistence
> > > to Jakarta Persistence move.
> > 
> > Thanks! I'm passing this on to our developers.
> 
> They can also use the transformer config files Christian wrote for
> our own migration efforts.

Noted, thanks!

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