Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

On 01/08, Johnson, Andrew N. wrote:
> We do try to be forward compatible with our APIs, so older code will
> generally compile and work on newer Base releases. There are times
> when we may break an API but if that happens deliberately we document
> that and show module developers how to change their code so it can be
> compiled against both the old and new APIs. If we do make an API change,
> code using the old API that needs to be modified should always break at
> compile-time, we don't want our users to find out they need to change
> their code after an upgrade when something doesn't work at 2am. We are
> very aware just how much out-of-tree support code is shared between the
> members of the EPICS collaboration, and most of the core developers have
> to maintain some of that either for the community of for their local
> site, so we see maintaining API compatibility as important.

That's positive.  Sorry to press more, but if EPICS adopted a semantic
versioning scheme, you'd have to increment the major version for *any*
incompatible API change.  But I'm sure the developers would make an
effort to avoid that by doing things differently, so it would likely not
be too big of a deal.