[PROJ] Backport policy to 6.0.x for database content and structure change ?

[Kristian Evers]

I think we should accept that some changes will be required during the first
few months of PROJ 6. So, I am fine with this change.

In the future (maybe from 6.1.0?) we should stick to the concepts of semantic
versioning, in the same way we do with code. So, only bug fixes in patch-releases,
which for the database I think should also include data updates. Minor version
releases can add new tables etc, but not remove anything and of course breaking
changes should only be allowed in major version releases.

/Kristian

> On 25 Mar 2019, at 17:44, Even Rouault <even.rouault at spatialys.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> In https://github.com/OSGeo/proj.4/pull/1368 , I've committed a few changes:
> - update of database with latest content of EPSG, IGNF and ESRI registries
> - add an extra column (operation_version) to tables that store coordinate 
> operations. This change was triggered by the fact that very recent evolutions 
> of the WKT2:2018 candidate standard have lead to adding this information in 
> WKT2, and this wasn't imported into the database until now since there was no 
> use in the code base before.
> 
> Are there thoughts about if this is material appropriate for backport to 
> 6.0.x? (the backport iself is technically trivial)
> 
> My point of view is that generally stable branches should be for bugfixes 
> only, and not feature changes, and such changes could be considered as 
> features.
> 
> But as 6.0.0 is really a version with a lot of changes that takes time to be 
> adopted, we might perhaps consider that its first bugfix release can receive 
> more changes withouth having bad consequences (apart from the database content 
> change, the only consequence would be if people use the capability to attach 
> extra custom databases to the main one, and in that case those databases must 
> have the same table structure as the main one, but I'm not aware of anyone 
> having used that)
> 
> Even
> 
> -- 
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> http://www.spatialys.com
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