Re: [Exist-development] Problem with new permissions stuff...

[Andrzej J. T. <an...@ch...>]

Adam:

> Its not that I am being unhelpful here, its that we have different
> perspectives and responsibilities. My perspective is that I am not
> concerned with backwards compatibility in the XML-RPC API and believe
> that that will be fine for the majority of users. Your perspective is
> that of a user that would prefer to see XML-RPC backward compatibility
> because its difficult inside your project.

Yup...that sums it up pretty well.

> Also we are both quite busy people, so I tend to focus on what is
> important to me. Maintaing backwards compatibility in the XML-RPC API
> is not important to me personally, I am not personally interested in
> it and no one is paying me to do that. Conversely, I am sure you focus
> on what is important to you... So if this is very important to you,
> then I also know that you have the necessary programming skills to
> look into this yourself and propose or contribute a fix (if one is
> possible).

I would love to....but in this particular case, the new Unix permissions stuff touched nearly a
hundred source files.  As you point out, there's not enough time for me to try and understand all
the intricacies of that code at this time, due to it's breadth and impact on the main code base.

What spare time I have, I'm going to try and devote this week to delving into the "duplicate
attribute" bug, since that has been tough to replicate with a simple test case, so I'll have to dive
into the code to figure out what is causing this.  This bug has serious implications on data and
code integrity, even though it's obviously a very specific set of circumstances (as yet unknown)
that cause it to manifest.  Plus fixing that bug means I can probably update our remote instances to
the latest SVN version which would resolve the XML-RPC API issue.

Because of instabilities, security re-architecture (and bugs), database structure/version changes
and the like, we've been unable to upgrade since last July, which is almost a year ago now.

The instability of the code base and lack of a 1.5 production capable release has been a concern to
me for some time now, since in the past everything was pretty much rock solid. Massive changes that
touch the whole code base, such as the recent permissions stuff, worry me since there's a good
chance that they will take a while to stabilize/debug (not to mention the testing required and
potential impact on existing applications, which I suspect will be great) and thus the code base
continues to be unstable.

The only reason I had updated our R&D instances to the latest SVN revisions was to be able to test
the impact of the permissions stuff on our apps.  I've reverted to a revision just prior to the
permissions stuff to get our deployment stuff to work again, since that was the easiest path for us.
I'll look into managing multiple versions of the eXist code base when we're ready to test the
permissions stuff. Given how extensive our app is and our history of finding issues in new code as a
result, I suspect that we'll chat again soon. ;-)

> Dont get me wrong, I would love to have the resources to take every
> sensible suggestion on-board and spend time working on everything for
> free for everyone, but I just dont have the resources at my disposal.

Same for me....though I think some time will free up soon for me to do more work on the eXist code
base, which I have not been able to do for the past few months.

-- 
Andrzej Taramina
Chaeron Corporation: Enterprise System Solutions
http://www.chaeron.com