Re: [Chicken-hackers] Re: repository branching

[John Cowan]

Felix Winkelmann scripsit:

> I doubt that this would work. The syntactic and semantic differences
> between two major chicken versions are subtle and try to make
> eggs compatible over all of them is impossible - nobody can keep this
> in his head.

I agree.  What is more, major version changes are really marketing
in Chicken (that is not a criticism), rather than signals about
compatibility.  If we changed the major version every time a new release
broke backward compatibility, we'd be on major version 5000 by now.

This is not only inevitable but desirable in an evolving language, where
probably 90% of Chicken has no specification except the implementation.
(R5RS is a specification, but it's small compared to Chicken or any
other Scheme; the SRFIs usually come with implementations that already
meet the specification.)

So in effect if you want stable behavior, you take a particular
snapshot of the language as it existed at that time, eggs and all.
If you want the closest available approximation to correct behavior,
you use HEAD-of-trunk, eggs and all.

> The only reliable method is to maintain the eggs
> for the current release, and only to critical fixed for old releases.

I agree completely.

-- 
What is the sound of Perl?  Is it not the       John Cowan
sound of a [Ww]all that people have stopped     address@hidden
banging their head against?  --Larry            http://www.ccil.org/~cowan