[Qgis-developer] Merging of incompatible changes

[Martin Dobias]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Sandro Santilli <strk at keybit.net> wrote:
>> And once all those changes settled in (upcoming) 2.0 - from my point of
>> view it would be time for a new release ..
>>
>> Probably we should introduce a max.Version to plugins too? ;)
>
> I think all changes should be made backward compatible unless the development
> cost in doing so is higher than the development cost of upgrading all plugins.

Since QGIS 1.0 released on January 2009 (nearly four years ago!) we
have been maintaining API compatibility - even at a cost of slightly
weird situations like having two vector rendering engines and two
labeling engines. But after some time it is necessary to remove old
stuff in order to keep moving forward. We realize that plugin authors
may not like the changes in API, but without that we simply cannot
improve the core libraries. The core dev team is small compared to the
community of plugin developers.

Martin