Proposed updates to Java product versioning policy

[Cantor, Scott]

Another round of edits is done, with the "package name matters, nothing else does" change to the class API question, and adding some proposed (and quite drafty) text on storage formats.

With storage, I don't think we have had, or have, any storage formats that are API at this point. We do have the audit log, which is sort of a storage format but I think that's just more one of those things that is under the heading of the API more broadly.

The change to the rule about package names, essentially rendering our module naming split irrelevant, means that we are not compliant with this policy now, and need to revisit package names. I filed two bugs on that today to track that work.

-- Scott

On 5/29/15, 2:02 PM, "Cantor, Scott" <cantor.2 at osu.edu> wrote:

>I had an action from a few dev calls back to update the Java versioning policy page [1] with new text covering more of the edge cases and questions that keep coming up on the calls.
>
>I've finally done so and marked it as a draft (I did it as one edit, so the previous page version should have the old policy if we want it back for some reason).
>
>Please review and raise any concerns on the list, or identify anything you still think is overlooked.
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>Of course, if you think we should abandon the "compatibility over everything" model that this is maintaining, that's fine. I wasn't intending to change the policy, just clarify it and extend it to cover the questions.
>
>-- Scott
>
>[1] https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/DEV/Java+Product+Version+Policy
>