transitioning release management

[Derrell Lipman]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 7:25 PM, simo <idra at samba.org> wrote:
>  Derrell,
>  my fear is that not adding the functionality you make a huge bet on the
>  fact you'll get the API/ABI right.
>  If you find out the new API/ABI does not fit future functionality you
>  will have to break it again. And that would not be painless.
>
>  How confident are you that you will get it right ?

That's a reasonable fear.  I'm actually fairly confident though.  My
changes are to make the internal workings more (nearly completely)
opaque, meaning that future changes don't affect the ABI at all.  The
API can then be extended (new functions) but should not need to be
changed in a non-backward-compatible manner any time in the near
future.  I'm perfectly happy (eager, in fact) to have others' eyes on
these changes to make sure I'm not missing anything, but this is
fairly straight forward stuff even though the patch will appear huge.

>  I agree that a major release is a perfect time to do an API change, but
>  we are planning also to release by April and there are a tons of things
>  to test already. This also weighs in in making me nervous of doing this
>  change right now.

Understandable.  I'll keep working on this until I'm told that it's a
no-go.  Hopefully I won't have wasted my time, but I'd rather work on
it now with the expectation that it'll be able to go in, rather than
forever have to deal with the status quo. :-)

Derrell