API stability¶
The release of configglue 1.0 comes with a promise of API stability and forwards-compatibility. In a nutshell, this means that code you develop against configglue 1.0 will continue to work against 1.1 unchanged, and you should need to make only minor changes for any 1.X release.
What “stable” means¶
In this context, stable means:
- All the public APIs – everything documented in the linked documents below, and all methods that don’t begin with an underscore – will not be moved or renamed without providing backwards-compatible aliases.
- If new features are added to these APIs – which is quite possible – they will not break or change the meaning of existing methods. In other words, “stable” does not (necessarily) mean “complete.”
- If, for some reason, an API declared stable must be removed or replaced, it will be declared deprecated but will remain in the API for at least two minor version releases. Warnings will be issued when the deprecated method is called.
- We’ll only break backwards compatibility of these APIs if a bug or security hole makes it completely unavoidable.
Stable APIs¶
In general, everything covered in the documentation is considered stable as of 1.0.
Exceptions¶
There are a few exceptions to this stability and backwards-compatibility promise.
Security fixes¶
If we become aware of a security problem we’ll do everything necessary to fix it. This might mean breaking backwards compatibility; security trumps the compatibility guarantee.
APIs marked as internal¶
Certain APIs are explicitly marked as “internal” in a couple of ways:
- Some documentation may refer to internals and mention them as such. If the documentation says that something is internal, we reserve the right to change it.
- Functions, methods, and other objects prefixed by a leading underscore (_). This is the standard Python way of indicating that something is private; if any method starts with a single _, it’s an internal API.