Re: River and Backward Compatibility

Nirmalya Sengupta wrote:

> Having said all these, I must also add that forking at the
> River (desperate attempt to sound poetic) is something we all
> should avoid and prevent. In any case, JavaSpaces does not hold
> that much of mind-share in the development community world over,
> as much we would like to. Forking will drag the subject into
> unnecessary controversy and may engender some to jump the ship.
>
> In this light, keeping backward compatibility is a necessity, I feel;
> unless of course, that is leading to meaningless complexity. Let's
> face it: to an average JavaSpaces enthusiast, tweaking the software
> is not an easy job. I would guess that by safeguarding the backward
> compatibility, we would help such people.

Hi Nirmalya,

FWIW I agree with the above and I don't know whether you are subscribed
to river-dev, but I believe because these discussions now take place in
3 mostly unconnected mailing lists it is easy to get the wrong impressions.

So far I see no single sign there is the (future) intention of 'forking'
and leaving API backward compatibility by any of the committers of
River, except for those things (com.sun.jini.* to org.apache.*) we have
to do in the future and which have some nasty ripple effects.

Backwards compatibility can mean a lot of things, for some it is only
related to the API, some include layout of a distribution or JAR file in
their definition and it depends a lot on the typical use of the JTSK
distribution. So although I think we get the essence when people say
"keeping backward compatibility is a necessity" that statement alone
can render void in discussions around modifications.
--
Mark

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