RFC 19: style and label attribute binding...

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Frank,

This is exactly my point, I may have been too subtle on this point.

This would have a major impact on DM Solutions, Where2GetIt and lots of 
others. It would be really bad to fracture PHP and SWIG mapscripts any 
more than they are now, I think we need DM Solutions to weight in on 
this also.

That said, if we are going to break, then lets really clean it up. This 
might include (in a separate RFC) more changes to support thread safety, 
better architecture for .NET and Java support if we need that etc. These 
are the things that would really justify a major breakage.

-SteveW

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> 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,