+1 This proposal makes a lot of sense.
Besides, I recently sent a proposal to allow clients to communicate with servers in an older version in case the compatibility was not broken in the new version of the client ([1]). With your proposal, the aim of that RFC could also be achieved. Following the example you have added to the JIRA ticket, a client with version 1.17 would be able to communicate with servers with version 1.15 or 1.16 given that the client server protocol for the client would be 1.15. [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/GEODE/Add+option+to+allow+newer+Geode+clients+to+connect+to+older+Geode+servers BR, Alberto G. ________________________________ From: Bruce Schuchardt <bru...@vmware.com> Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2021 6:38 PM To: dev@geode.apache.org <dev@geode.apache.org> Subject: [DISCUSS] client/server communications and versioning I’m considering a change in client/server communications that I would like feedback on. We haven’t changed on-wire client/server communications since v1.8 yet we tie these communications to the current version. The support/1.14 branch identifies clients as needing v1.14 for serialization/deserialization, for instance, even though nothing has changed in years. If we put out a patch release, say v1.12.1, clients running that patch version cannot communicate with servers running v1.12.0. They also can’t communicate with a server running v1.13.0 because that server doesn’t know anything about v1.12.1 and will reject the client. To solve that problem we currently have to issue a new 1.13 release that knows about v1.12.1 and users have to roll their servers to the new v1.13.1. I propose to change this so that the client’s on-wire version is decoupled from the “current version”. A client can be running v1.14.0 but could use v1.8.0 as its protocol version for communications. This would have an impact on contributors to the project. If you need to change the client/server protocol version you will need to modify KnownVersion.java to specify the change, and should let everyone know about the change. See https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GEODE-8963
