[ewg] Compatibility in OFED

[Betsy Zeller]

Sasha - one of the things we discussed at the Sonoma conference was
evolving our development process to emphasize the "Enterprise" in "Open
Fabrics Enterprise Distribution". Part of that is minimizing disruption
when new versions of OFED are installed. We want customers to feel
comfortable upgrading to new versions of OFED, and that's not going to
be true if they get surprised by other (previously working) software
breaking after installation. 

What John is asking for here (at least deliver both versions of the
library for some period of time, and preferably don't break backward
compatibility at all) seems pretty reasonable from the user's
perspective, though I acknowledge that actually doing this requires
extra effort.

Separately, we should discuss how me manage version changes -
introducing a version change in the middle of the RCs seems a bit late
in the process.

Regards, Betsy

On Mon, 2008-06-02 at 23:17 +0300, Sasha Khapyorsky wrote:
> On 09:55 Mon 02 Jun     , John Russo wrote:
> > In OFED 1.3rc2 we noticed that libosmcomp's version had changed from 1
> > to 2.
> > 
> > Unfortunately this has caused forward compatibility problems for
> > existing applications which were compiled against OFED 1.2.5.1.  It
> > would be preferred if when such upgrades occur, both the .1 and .2
> > version of the library are provided such that existing applications do
> > not need to be recompiled nor reinstalled.
> 
> What is the problem to recompile? Anyway you can keep old version if you
> like.
> 
> > Alternatively limiting the
> > necessity for such library version changes (never break old interfaces)
> > would be preferred.
> 
> It is hard to promise for 100%. libosmcomp is not a great candidate for
> stable API (it is even not documented). I'm sure that changes were done
> for a reason and obviously it was published/discussed on the list.
> 
> Sasha
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