Incremental deployment
From APIDesign
When talking about the need for BackwardCompatibility I often talk in context of distributed development. Without some sort of BackwardCompatibility you can't expect independent groups to develop on top of each other's libraries. This might imply, that BackwardCompatibility is only important when multiple (distributed) parties are involved. Paradoxically That would be a false conclusion. Here the following story!
NetBeans 7.0.1 Bugfix Release
NetBeans 7.0 was released in May 2011. Since then we worked hard on subsequent bugfixing release, to be out in August 2011. Users of NetBeans bugfix releases have two options: either download whole bits from scratch or update their existing installation in place using plugin manager.
Traditionally we have problems upgrading (as that is not scenario tested during developement) and bugs are discovered only by our quality department just at the time or release (maybe we could tight up our processes a bit). The release 7.0.1 was not an exception. There was a severe bug in the update scenario. But this one was very curious.
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