BC promise doesn't care about constants

[dosten]

Searching in the BC promise i don't find any information about the removal, etc of a constant in a normal or API class. Ex: In symfony/symfony#14531 the PATTERN constant it's not necessarry but i don't know if i can remove it since the class is tagged as @api.

[stof]

Constants are public in PHP, so they cannot be removed

[dosten]

Agree, what do you think about adding this into the "Changing Interfaces/Classes" tables in the BC promise page?

[stof]

@dosten sounds good to me. Can you send a PR to improve it ?

[wouterj]

👍

[dosten]

Yes, of course

[dosten]

Before sending a PR i want to be sure about the changes allowed.

Type of Change	Regular	API
Add constant	yes	no
Remove constant	no	no
Change value	no	no

Adding a constant to a API class/interface must be allowed?

[wouterj]

@dosten I would say:

Type of Change	Regular	API
Add constant	yes	yes
Remove constant	no	no
Change value	yes	no

/cc @fabpot @webmozart

[dosten]

@wouterj I'm not sure about allow to change the value of a constant in a normal class/interface.

[dosten]

ping @fabpot @webmozart

[stof]

Changing the value of the constant depends of what the goal of the constant is. In most cases, it is not allowed. But we have a constant in the Yaml component providing a regex IIRC, and changing the value to fix a bug in the regex would be allowed for instance

[dosten]

So, we can allow to change the value of a constant in a regular or API class/interface with a footnote?