Re: [DebianGIS] Hi all!
On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 08:02:24AM +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
>
> [Christopher Schmidt]
> > I'm not sure what you mean by "OSM API Stabilizes"? The API hasn't
> > changed for 5 months, and (as far as I'm aware) there is no plan to
> > change it in a backwards incompatible way in the future. Either I
> > don't know something, or I don't understand something: How long does
> > it make sense to 'hold off' waiting for something which isn't
> > changing to stabilize?
>
> Well, I would want a promise from the developers and an effort from
> the developers to keep the promise before I would like to trust that
> an API is stable. Not sure if such promise have been made. Are you?
What promise are you looking for? As far as I understand it, there's no
such thing as an accurate Debian release schedule, so you're asking them
to keep the same API for some period o time greater than two years
without an actual deadline. I certainly wouldn't be able to promise that
as a software developer.
Looking at the history, it appears that there has been one backwards
incompatible API change in the 4.5 years of the project, no? (0.3 -> 0.4
was a configuration option in JOSM, which would have required knowing
about that, but that's easy to flip the switch on.) I can't imagine any
web service that's only a couple years old that can make promises for
more than 2 years reliably.
I guess I see having a working package for part of the release as more
important than not supporting the users who are interested at all. This
is probably a position which is antithetical to the Debian position :)
So I'll hush up and wander on.
Regards,
--
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta
Reply to: