[albatross-users] New release?

[Tim Churches]

On Sun, 2003-09-21 at 00:21, Sheila King wrote:
> The above is over my head, as I am not that intimate with the Albatross 
> source and that level of development is beyond where I am personally 
> comfortable. However, for me, the last Albatross upgrade set me back two 
> weeks of trying to fix code that "broke" for me and allowed me to make no 
> progress in my actual task at hand, just trying to scramble to get my code 
> functioning again due to upgrading Albatross.
> 
> Certainly gives me pause in considering to upgrade Albatross further if it 
> is going to break stuff each time. Especially since for me, I have no way 
> to install an upgrade without overwriting my current install. I wish it 
> were possible to do an alt-install switch, like one can do with Python, so 
> that you can easily have more than one version installed.

I agree. There is now a sufficiently large installed base of Albatross
apps that serious consideration needs to be given to backwards
compatibility. If new features are introduced, they need to have new
names, and the old ones need to be retained with their original names -
possibly marked as deprecated, but still retained so that existing apps
don't break. Just like Python, which has achieved a remarkable level of
backwards compatibility (not perfect, but very good, with excellent
signposting of future breakage).
-- 

Tim C

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