[Zope-dev] Re: Time-based releases a good idea?

[Max M]

Andreas Jung wrote:

> At some point you have to make a cut to get rid of old crap. Fixing the 
> zLOG
> issue is a straight forward approach with very little risks for the 
> programmer and it won't take too much time..I don't see a major problem 
> with that.


Except that it hits a sore spot for open source right on the head.

Products are developed for our customers, and they will keep working for 
those customers until they choose to upgrade.

In my case, a single product often starts out as a tool for a single 
customer, that I then make available. Usually I get a lot of 
(unreasonable) change request that I ignore :-s, but no bug fixes at 
all. That is fair enough, as I don't fix many bugs in other peoples 
products.

But the problem is that I don't fix bugs that doesn't exist for my 
customers. So deprecation warnings are ignored, until the product 
sponsor chooses upgrade.

If this is how OSS generally works, as I expect, then deprecations will 
break stuff that just doesn't get fixed. And new user will find it 
impossible to get all the products they need to work together, in the 
latest version.


But the problem is probably not the time based release, just that there 
is to few generations for deprecations.



-- 

hilsen/regards Max M, Denmark

http://www.mxm.dk/
IT's Mad Science

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