Re: How kannel creates "cgi-bin" program to handle "http" requests

Why change a running horse?

I can understand we can announce "breaking changes" in the NEWS.
But there has to be a good reason for a change. like chaning from  
latin1 to utf8 which make's certain things no longer break.
but changing the name of the /cgi-bin/sendsms string to /whatever for  
me is breaking something which works for absolutely no benefit.

On 22.10.2008, at 15:50, Stipe Tolj wrote:

> Guillaume Cottenceau schrieb:
>> "Alejandro Guerrieri" <aguerrieri 'at' kannel.org> writes:
>>
>>> I'm worried about backward compatibility. If it's removed and the  
>>> cgi-bin URL
>>> no longer works, people will have to modify their applications to  
>>> point to the
>>> new URL after the upgrade.
>>
>> As long as Kannel offers a clear "what changed" document in new
>> releases, I don't see a problem. Well-designed applications don't
>> hardcode paths, or hardcode it so that modifications are possible
>> when needed. Well-behaving administrators/developers read what
>> changed documents, and test new releases of software on a
>> test/staging environment before going to production.
>
> yep, all "breaking changes" are documented in the NEWS file section.
>
>>> IMHO the ideal approach would be to be able to maintain the "old"  
>>> url as well
>>> (at least for the time being, maybe with a warning on the log  
>>> files saying that
>>> it is deprecated).
>>
>> It can be good to offer a backwards compatibility layer, but it
>> also means 1- extra time needed for Kannel developers 2- more
>> potential bugs (more lines of code = more bugs) 3- when this
>> backwards compatibility is abandoned in next-next release, you'll
>> still get angry users not reading documentation who will be
>> bitten anyway.
>
> yep, which leads to the generic life problem: you can't make all  
> people happy at
> the same time ;) ... I call it MDSP in theoretical information  
> science (multi
> dimensional satisfactory problem)... BTW it's NP-hard.
>
> Stipe
>
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