Paolo Mainardi wrote:
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 2:04 PM, Nathaniel Catchpole <catch56@googlemail.com <mailto:catch56@googlemail.com>> wrote:
Dries, also, said that releasing drupal 6 without drupal.org <http://drupal.org> being updated to it was a mistake he doesn't want to see happen again.
Why it's happen ? Because big missing, "Views, OG, Panels etc...etc...", because backward compatibility API doesn't exists.
Views 2 (in Drupal 6) isn't compatable with Views 1 (in 5.x). A 'backwards compatability API' would have had zero effect, possibly a negative effect on the Views upgrade process.
My point is different, a backward compatibility API could run Views 1.x on D > 5, this was the point.
No, it can't. Drupal changed entire sub systems. Not just how the functions are called but how the data is stored and what the data signatures are. A 'backwards compatibility API' would have required KEEPING data around that would cause the system to run slowly. The performance would be a nightmare. When going from version to version, one of the advantages is that we can throw away paradigms that are unsuccessful. A backwards compatibility API requires us to keep those paradigms. Remember, an API is not just a bunch of function signatures. It is much, much deeper than that, and they would completely change the wya things have to be implemented. They would be a major burden, possibly MORE major than the effort of simply upgrading the modules to new APIs.