That's the first comment in this thread that's both new and useful. On 5/30/06, Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com> wrote:
Honestly, I think part of the issue with the "stable API" question is that Drupal uses version numbers differently from many projects. The de facto standard for version numbers for most projects is Major.Minor.Bug / x.y.z.
Z increases only fix bugs. Y increases add features, but don't break backward compatibility with 3rd party code. X increases, all bets are off.
Witness, for instance, KDE, which has evolved and improved dramatically in the 3.y.z cycle, but code for 3.0.0 still (generally) works in 3.5.1. For the upcoming 4.0, howver, there are no "sacred cows" and everything will need to be updated.
For Drupal, Y increases, all bets are off. We technically don't have Y releases, just Z and X, but we use both of the first two numbers for the X releases. That throws a lot of people off. It actually surprised me a great deal, although fortunately it didn't affect my plans significantly.
Whatever else we do, we should probably make that clearer right up front. It's not inherently a bad development model, just an unconventional one that needs to be made clearer.
--Larry Garfield