RFC 19: style and label attribute binding...

[Frank Warmerdam]

Steve Lime wrote:
> I'm all for consistency in point releases but major releases give us the opportunity
> to clean things up a bit. Even in those cases disruption should be minimized. In this
> case I would advocate a clean up...

Folks,

If we are going to break compatibility I would hope we would use the
opportunity to do some serious cleanup.  I'd add that breaking mapscript
applications is as serious as break pure mapfile based applications to my
mind.  And every time we do that we lose people who end up stuck back on
ancient versions of mapserver because they don't have the time / knowledge
to fix things up for a new version.  Folks trapped on old versions like
this are hard to help, and don't generally get to contribute much useful
to the community.   This is my way of saying I hate breaking backward
compatibility.

That said, if we were to do so at an obvious point like the move to 5.0
at least is should be pretty understandable.  Much worse to break
compatibility going from 4.6 to 4.8 for instance.

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org