Unlock opensaml-parent ?

[Ian Young]

> On 23 Oct 2015, at 17:50, Cantor, Scott <cantor.2 at osu.edu> wrote:
> 
> I don't know if I would agree that consistency isn't itself a benefit in a complex software environment with a lot of pieces.

I'm not saying that consistency doesn't sometimes lead to benefit, of course it often does. Sometimes, though, doing things *just* because they are "more consistent" in some sense actually leads in the wrong direction.

I once had to deal with a group whose QA manager (who had come from the world of physical widget manufacture) had decided that in the software the group wrote, all variable names were to be exactly four characters long, with the first character being 'X' and the other three digits digits. This was more consistent, but I did not think that consistency in that case lead to any benefit.

In this particular case, I think we're seeing something suggested just because it is more consistent without a clear idea of where the benefit will come from that will pay for all the extra work that will be involved. It seems to throw the whole idea of versioning the components independently out of the window. I can't see how we can believe that this is broken to the extent that would justify this without also giving up on semantic versioning for our own artifacts: for example, there's no requirement for people plugging things into the IdP to be using exactly the same parent POM as we did in a particular release. It's supposed to be the APIs that matter, not the way the artifact was built.

    -- Ian




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