[Zope] Re: RFC: Proposed backward-compatibility policy

[Jim Fulton]

Gfeller Martin wrote:
> Jim, 
> 
> I think this is a very fair and gentle policy for any kind 
> a programmable product, and an extremly fair policy for an 
> open source product (where I can check and/or modify the source 
> if I run into a crucial compatibility problem). 
> 
> You probably have to explicitly exclude the environment of 
> external methods,

Why do you say that?

 > and restrict compatbility to the published APIs
> ("published" being easier to define in Zope 3 than in Zope 2, I assume).

Defining what's "public" is definately a challenge.  Zope 3 is farther
along here, but there are still issues.  This issue is the motivation
for the "testing" paragraph in the proposed policy.  Rather than asking
the Zope developers to know what people are relying on for sure, we are
going to rely on people catching problems during testing.  Developers
will make reasonable guesses, but they have some freedom to take risks,
relying on people to tell them if they've broken something.

Jim

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