[Zope3-dev] A thought on backward compatibility and minimum versions

[Bernd Dorn]

On 31.05.2007, at 20:08, Dieter Maurer wrote:

> I fear my colleagues responsible to maintain the productive versions
> would not be happy:
>
>   They want the system to be as stable as possible.
>
>   If they need to introduce a new component, they usually
>   prefer to just add this one component. Only if this forces
>   other updates, they reluctantly will make them.
>
> The motivation for this behaviour: even if a newer version
> is supposed to be backward compatible, it often has slightly different
> behaviour which may trigger bugs in the other parts of a complex  
> system.

i think we are talking about package dependencies here, and not  
application dependencies

if an egg based application e.g zope 3.5 is released, the package  
versions should be nailed down anyways by buildouts "version" section  
and packages should be more tolerant, so that changes of version  
conflicts gets minimized when collecting them in an application