Forum OpenACS Development: Re: New Tcl API proc "package_exec_plsql" ...

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Posted by Don Baccus on
We'll we've been in a "feature freeze" state forever on 5.0 and I hate to do anything, no matter how trivial, that might add even one extra day to the release at this point.

On the other hand, being a brand new API routine no code usees it, depends on it, etc so adding it won't break any of our code, not at all.

So it would be safe from that POV.

I'm open one way or the other ... it is a convenience for anyone planning to do custom development under 5.0 ...

Don,

I don't think you should do it.  "Feature freeze" should mean "feature freeze".  It's easy for someone doing custom development on 5.0 to add it.

--cro

Other than the "rules are rules" point of view (which does have some point), I don't see why not to add it, either now or soon. The only practical drawback is that there might be some bug with this new feature that we haven't discovered yet and will, in theory, make the 5.0.0 release look bad if some new developer finds it. But, really, that's not very significant, is it?

And surely since it can't possibly break anything, this handy feature should at least go in for 5.0.1? And if 5.0.1 is ok why not for 5.0.0 right now, unless perhaps you want to wait for 5.0.1 to see that it gets extra testing? It doesn't need to wait for 5.1, however many unknown months that is away, does it?

And no I don't think it's particularly reasonable to expect users to be back-porting stuff from Head to 5.0 all the time. If you're going to recommend that as being easy (as opposed to "if you really need it you can try, but I think it'll be tough, that's why we haven't done it yet"), then why not just "back port" it sooner for everybody to use, like right now? If it's not good enough to go into the stable branch than presumably it's not good enough to recommend for people to back-port either, no?