[slf4j-dev] Merging Logger and MarkingLogger

[Ceki Gülcü]

I appreciate your comments.

I think one needs to approach these questions with
pragmatism. Maintaining absolute (as in total) backward compatibility
in presence of evolution is an incredibly costly proposal. It is
beyond reach for everyone except perhaps the largest software
companies. Even in the case of Microsoft, the cost of maintaining
backward compatibility is so high that even they eventually give up
and start over from a different point. The recent backward
compatibility changes in log4j correct 0.01% of incompatibility
problems whereas the binary compatibility problem accounting for
99.99% of cases has not been corrected. In all fairness, it's a tough
nut to crack. As for JCL, the changes are not about the interface but
its implementation.

I am not aware of anyone using the MarkerLogger interface. Are you
using it? As for your comments about the significance of release
candidate, you are right. However, I rather perform the change now
instead of later, say after the release of 1.0final.


At 04:22 PM 1/26/2006, you wrote:
>My last mail did not correspond to the actual changes in svn. Some of my
>questions/points found answers through that.
>
> > I intend to merge methods in MarkingLogger back into Logger with the
> > understanding that the bindings for logging systems without marker
> > support would simply ignore the Marker data (as was the vase prior to
> > SLF4J 1.0beta8).
> > Comments?
>
>What is very misleading for users:
>On
>http://www.slf4j.org/download.html
>one can download a *ReleaseCandidate* five. Most other open source projects
>have a very conservative version numbering and (different to many commercial
>software) show with the number what the state is really. (Think of JDOM
>which was a very long time 0.x before release and "final").
>The log4j team and JCL team currently heavily works on backwards
>compatibility (I do not write "reach") - users excpect that from a core
>infrastructure API. Maybe your changes are compatible for users of "Logger",
>but what about users of "MarkingLogger"?
>
>A release candidate can have bugfixes and documentation add-ons but
>interfaces should not change.
>
>Please consider to change the version number back to 0.x and clearly state
>on the homepage something like "experimental", "alpha" or "subject to
>change" so everyone knows where the project stands.
>
>
>Regards
>Boris

-- 
Ceki Gülcü