[Freeipa-devel] Designing better API compatibility

[Martin Kosek]

On 03/20/2015 04:46 PM, Rob Crittenden wrote:
> Simo Sorce wrote:
>> On Fri, 2015-03-20 at 15:30 +0100, Petr Spacek wrote:
>>> On 20.3.2015 14:19, Simo Sorce wrote:
>>>> This is not sufficient, older 3.3 and 4.x servers can't be changed and
>>>> we MUST be compatible with those.
>>>> Basically the plan MUST work with already released servers, this is a
>>>> constraint that cannot be releaxed, please work within this limitations.
>>>
>>> Currently new clients do not work with older servers, right?
>>>
>>> Maybe we should do one more (last!) release like that and do a big cut after
>>> that. It would make the design so much easier if the new (supposedly thin)
>>> client does not need to support ancient servers which had only 'fat' clients.
>>
>> People are using 3.3 and 4.1 now, we want to support them too, whatever
>> it takes.
>> For future clients we can do whatever fancy automated thin client and
>> what not, and in time drop support for very old releases, but 3.3 and <
>> 4.2 are going to be around for quite a while and we need to support
>> those server in the clients.
>
> I think 3.0 should be the baseline. It will around another few years at
> least.
>
> rob
>

Yes, 3.0 is base line. It is the version shipped in RHEL/CentOS-6 and until 
that dies*, we should be friendly with it.

* Looking at https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata, this 
looks like year ~2020 :-)