format compatibility

[Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems)]

On Wednesday, November 10, 2010 02:01:37 pm Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> I agree that we must find a way forward and be able to break backwards
> compatibility in important cases to avoid collecting cruft.
> 

I suppose some Open Standards such as ODF show us some level of compatibility 
can be and is being provided even with older client applications (but for that 
fundamentally broken one which needs a plugin from Sun), as long as the 
application is made to deal with the versioning, and the versions of the 
standard can be translated into format parsing libraries for the program, and 
(...).

I suppose the really big question then becomes whether or not to 
(automatically? optionally?) convert to a newer format or to maintain the 
original data in the original format... but not touching it seems a sane 
approach for now.

Luckily, as far as the Kolab XML format is concerned, we do have a finite 
universe, and we could thus set the milestone for the clients we support 
and/or certify, to support versions of the Kolab XML format, to a certain date 
and time in the future -UTC, naturally :P

That said, the Real Problems happen now, and any future milestone will take 
some time; which could mean we would still need a working solution now.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen

-- 
Senior Engineer, Kolab Systems AG

e: vanmeeuwen at kolabsys.com
t: +316 42 801 403
w: http://www.kolabsys.com

pgp: 9342 BF08
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