Went Through it With Brad

[Johannes Ernst]

I very much believe in backwards compatibility. I believe I'm saying  
the same thing that Brad and David were saying in the original  
message on this thread. This is a classical case of a tradeoff -- and  
non-computer-interpreted version strings is the side I come down on  
because I have tried the other and it can get very ugly when machines  
mis-guess what happened.

On Nov 10, 2006, at 10:27, Pete Rowley wrote:

> Johannes Ernst wrote:
>>> 1) 9.1 in the openid.ns parameter talks about using this value in
>>> regards to compare with a lower version number of the protocol.   
>>> Looking
>>> at things such as Jabber, it is nearly impossible to deal with  
>>> version
>>> comparisons in any sane way.  I'm not sure what the best way is to
>>> resolve this.
>>
>> In my experience, one should use a human-comprehensible versioning  
>> scheme, but software should only do equals/does not equal  
>> comparisons; no automatic "guesses" whether or not version 4 of  
>> something is the same as version 2, or to what degree.
> That works if you don't believe in backwards compatibility :)
>
> Without the ability to determine the version in use is greater than  
> some minimum version or the major version # is different to the one  
> expected life gets pretty harsh.
>
>
> -- 
> Pete
>