On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 11:30 PM, Roland Haas roland.haas@physics.gatech.edu wrote:
Precisely because ADMBase is used by everyone, it would have been nice if its public interface had not changed :-). Even if the old interface is now considered faulty in some situations.
It didn't change... You were performing unnecessary work all along because both ADMBase and your code evolved the ADMBase variables. Since ADMBase came first, your code overwrote this, so no one was hurt; and since ADMBase didn't perform any expensive operations, you didn't notice.
We are discussing here whether to keep a known bug in ADMBase's default parameter settings to help people save time improving performance of private codes that don't follow the ADMBase standard. ADMBase is a really basic, really important thorn for many people, and it needs to be correct and not surprise first-time users. Changing its interface requires much thinking, including about users who are not vocal on these mailing lists.
There's nothing wrong with discussing some of the ADMBase and friends' design decisions; in particular, CoordGauge and StaticConformal come to my mind. But given the user base, this requires careful planning, prominent announcements to the community, and we will have to help people update their codes. We will probably end up supporting both versions for some time. Given that the next ET release focuses on infrastructure improvements, we may want to leave this for another round -- that would then be a "cleanup" release where we focus on clarity, tutorials, debuggability, and improving performance by making sure all the "little things" are in order.
-erik