Backward Compatibility

[pancakereport]

UC Berkeley's DataHub is currently having a discussion about upgrading Otter across our hubs. Most hubs are running at least 3.1.4. We're concerned about breaking changes that will impact instructors.

My short question: Is Otter backwards compatible? If instructors are using older versions of otter to create notebooks than what's on the hub, will we have problems? I've seen that there's been some dependency changes and dependency management changes. Are there other changes that might indicate a compatibility issue?

I've seen instructors create notebooks with higher Otter versions (5.7.1) than what's on the hub they're using (4.4.1) without issue.

[chrispyles]

Otter makes no backwards-compatibility guarantees across major versions (e.g. there can/probably are breaking changes between 3.x.x and 4.x.x, 4.x.x and 5.x.x, etc.). Minor and patch versions will always be backwards-compatible with other versions in the same major version.

That being said, I do make an attempt at backwards-compatibility, but there will likely be some changes that instructors will need to make.

I do also think upgrading is a good idea; there have been many improvements (and important security fixes) since v3.