Should we be so strict on maintaining backwards compatibility?

[Pedro Duque Vieira]

Yes, that's true. Kirill was a proponent of breaking backwards
compatibility. I used his libraries a lot: flamingo, substance, etc and for
each release I had to do some migration.
My experience with Kirill's libraries tells me that breaking backwards
compatibility is worse it. Having wrong decisions plaguing the next
releases is far worse. It was a bit of a pain to migrate, but one worse
enduring.

I think changes should be made as quickly as possible if we wait till the
next major release, the migration step will be worse, and the errors/wrong
decisions will accumulate into a worse problem each release.


Kirill asked that same question a long time ago for his Substance library
> and it is a very valid one. Like then I would vote to maintain backwards
> compatibility in all minor release, but allow for well considered breaking
> on major releases (I have a candidate already BTW ;-). This would also
> prevent the stacking over all releases; design decisions from Java 1.0 are
> still plaguing 7.0.
> Tom

-- 
Pedro Duque Vieira