Webservice as a Stable API

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 10:15 +0100, Gervase Markham wrote:
> On the same principle, should we make all return values hashes? Or is
> that overkill?

	That seems like a good idea to me, too.

> > 	3) Functions don't disappear.
> 
> But if we end up with a big backwards-compatibility problem, we can
> always add doFoo2().

	Good point.

> I would hope everything is EXPERIMENTAL at the moment!

	It is. :-) Or its undocumented, which makes it UNSTABLE.

> > Anything labeled "EXPERIMENTAL" should
> > become "STABLE" by a final release.
> 
> I don't agree (reasonably strongly). This effectively makes all
> interface stabilisation block the release. I think it's entirely fine to
> ship final releases with things still labelled EXPERIMENTAL. That just
> tells people not to use them if they want to be sure their code won't
> break. We should not rush stabilisation of an interface.

	Okay, fair enough. Although I think release time is the time to
*consider* stabilization. I think we should have some point where it's
somewhat forced (or at least forced to be considered), since otherwise
we could just gleefully mark everything EXPERIMENTAL forever and keep on
changing it. :-)

	-Max
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