On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 7:13 PM, Michael Gratton <mikeg@cse.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
> On 26/03/13 03:10, Dave Hershberger wrote:
>> I wish I had time to actually work on this right now.  Failing that I
>> will just suggest:
>>
>> Please don't break backwards compatibility.  It makes unnecessary work
>> for lots of people down the road, and doesn't save that much work now.
>>  It's hard enough migrating from one ROS release to the next already,
>> let's not (knowingly) make it worse.
>
> +1! While ROS clearly has no API/ABI stability contracts from release to
> release, the fewer breaking changes the better. Especially with such a
> rapid release cycle.

For 1.0 or greater package versions, there is *supposed* to be a
commitment to API (but not ABI) stability between distro releases.

 http://www.ros.org/wiki/StackVersionPolicy#Release_1.0

Changes to stable interfaces should be released with backwards
compatibility for at least one release and deprecation warnings to
notify users of the need to upgrade during that tick-tock cycle.
--
 joq