25 Jun
2013
25 Jun
'13
12:31 p.m.
Hi Marius,
On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 9:58 AM, Marius Dumitru Florea <
mariusdumitru.florea(a)xwiki.com> wrote:
Hi Denis,
Sorry for breaking your code, but in
Just to make it clear, that was really not my goal to get your personal
apologize here, or to blame you personally. Once again, I just want all of
us (including me !) to remember that a minor change can have serious
consequences, and that CLIRR is not a tools we can rely on blindly to keep
our code compatible. I am sure we are all sorry not to have catched that
issue before, because we are all concerned.
http://lists.xwiki.org/pipermail/devs/2012-October/052487.html you
seemed to agree with me that relying on the technical class name is
not good. While I preserved the full name in the XAR export, as shown
by the code you pasted below, I keep the short, generic form, in the
platform code. I'm curious to know how were you using
classes.PropertyClass#getClassType() in your code that it got broken.
If there is someone to blame, it would be me, for not catching the bad
usage we were making of this API, since we I know a better way that could
have avoid using it. Anyway, to answer your question, we were using it to
know if the type of the properties is a string or a number and choose
between a "like" and an "=" in a "where" clause expression.
As for api.PropertyClass#getClassType(), again, I
don't think relying
on the technical class name is good, and, as you can see,
api.PropertyClass#getType() (the 'pretty' version of getClassType)
didn't change it's behaviour because I really thought that is the
method really used in scripts, not getClassType().
I totally agree with you, and I would have even change the API version as
well. Doing it half way is not so good IMO since it increase complexity,
and could cause confusion. So we may also consider changing the API version
as well, WDYT ?
This doesn't excuse the lack of mention in the
release notes though.
I'll fix that.
That was really the point, being careful to clearly mention all our
incompatible changes in the RN.
Personally, I think we are sometime too conservative in that matter, and
that properly explained incompatible change does not hurt.
Thanks for fixing this and taking care for the future :)
On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 1:51 PM, Denis Gervalle <dgl(a)softec.lu> wrote:
--
Denis Gervalle
SOFTEC sa - CEO
eGuilde sarl - CTO
Hi Devs,
Passing CLIRR is far from sufficient to stay backward compatible or
document incompatible changes !
I know that you know that already, but I want you to remind it once more
because while I was on the road showcasing a site, I had to discover
that a
major feature of the site got broken, and it was
silently true for a
while
apparently. I missed some potential leads, which
get me really upset, so
I
waited a while before writing.
The cause was a very simple incompatible change introduced in 4.3M2 !
But tracking it down was not easy since this API breakage was not
reported
in the RN.
Here it is:
com.xpn.xwiki.objects.classes.PropertyClass#getClassType is no more
reporting the full classname of the type, but now drop the "Class"
suffix.
So,
"com.xpn.xwiki.objects.classes.StringClass" become "String",
"com.xpn.xwiki.objects.classes.NumberClass" become "Number"... and so
on.
The unprivileged API com.xpn.xwiki.api.PropertyClass#getClassType() was
also impacted since "StringClass" become "String",
"NumberClass" become
"Number" and so on.
The javadoc of the latter function get updated, meaning that we were
really
conscious a breakage was done here. Even more
conscious, the following
was
applied in the toXML() method:
String classType = getClassType();
if (this.getClass().getSimpleName().equals(classType + "Class")) {
// Keep exporting the full Java class name for old/default property
types to avoid breaking the XAR format
// (to allow XClasses created with the current version of XWiki to be
imported in an older version).
classType = this.getClass().getName();
}
The com.xpn.xwiki.objects.meta.MetaClass was also, since it was using
those
name as property names. Some compatibility change
was applied as well,
with
explicit comments.
But apparently, no one notice (including myself !), and this incompatible
change goes through without even a mention in the RN, nor in the the jira
issue (XWIKI-8355).
So guys, I have no intend to blame anyone here, but I couldn't warn you
more about potential consequence of incompatible changes. These need to
be
discuss, or at least clearly mentioned in the RN.
Do not rely on CLIRR
for
doing the job, it don't.
Probably adding a mention about those changes in the RN of 4.3 is better
now than never, Marius, could you take care of it ?
Thanks for your attention,
--
Denis Gervalle
SOFTEC sa - CEO
eGuilde sarl - CTO
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