Ivan Sergio Borgonovo wrote:
On Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:17:03 -0700 "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com> wrote:
I believe the solution to this problem is to look at mature open source projects and how they handle their development model.
Could it be a starting to have a release cycle where functions in spite of disappearing are marked "deprecated" and disappear in a later release?
I wish people would quit suggesting this, as though backward compatibility in Drupal is eschewed out of whim or, worse, malicious intent. API is not about function signatures. If it were just that, this whole backward compatibility thing would be easy. API is about data. Where data is stored; where it can be found; how it can be accessed, and how it is utilized. Most of the really big changes from one Drupal version to another fundamentally change how some piece of data is used. Just keeping old function names and signatures will not improve backward compatibility significantly. This is particularly true in Drupal with its system of hooks. The hooks change; in order to have 'backward compatibility' we'd have to call old hooks as well as new hooks. That's a performance nightmare. It also creates crufty, inefficient code.