DR-08-0012: Preventing a slippery slope

[Shawn Villaron]

Greetings,

Over lunch today I spent some time thinking about versioning based on our earlier conversation today.  I found the documents that Gareth and Alex mentioned very insightful ( thank you ).  I know we've all been tasked with going back and doing some deeper thinking about versioning - which I'll do - but I wanted to test a best principle of mine regarding the evolution of the standard.  I've always been of the opinion that as the standard evolves, new features should be added in a backward compatible way ( using a variety of pre-existing technologies such as OPC, MCE, extLst, etc. ) and that breaking changes would be very rare.  Since any deeper thinking on versioning on my part would be based on this premise, I wanted to verify if folks in WG4 saw things similarly.

I put DR-08-0012 in the subject line because I could see a logical argument being made that if we were willing to break the namespace, "anything goes."  I believe that this would be an extreme mistake for the standard.  And so I wonder if we ought to put text into the response for DR-08-0012 explaining the extra-ordinary circumstances behind this change and explicitly call out that this should change not be used as justification for additional breaking changes.

I look forward to hearing what others think we ought to do here.

Shawn Villaron
Group Program Manager, Microsoft Office PowerPoint
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.vse.cz/pipermail/sc34wg4/attachments/20090528/1a028a14/attachment.htm>