Backward Compatibility Issues

Just today I spent few hours trying to figure out why changed makeinfo version output broke binutils build. Well, it's an old bug but we all getting mad when backward compatibility breaks. Especially when it affects our software. Especially when we don't have time no passion to fix that. My complains raised to the roof or probably even higher.

Life is a strange thing. Right after that I went ahead a broke sphinx4 backward compatibility in model packaging (again!). Now models distributed with sphinx4 follow Sphinxtrain output format, all files are in the single folder, model definition is named simply "mdef" and there is feat.params. Things are very
straightforward:


It will certainly help to avoid confusion when new developers change the model, adapt the model or train their own one.

In the future I hope to get feat.params used better in order to automatically build frontend, derive feature extraction properties, hold metadata about model and similar things. Shiny future is getting closer.

I also removed RM1 model from the distribution. I don't think anybody is using it.

So please don't complain, let's better fix that until it's too late to fix. One day we'll get everything in place and we'll release final version sphinx4-1.0. And after that we'll certainly be backward-compatible. I really like Java and Windows because of their long-term backward-compatible policy. We can do even better.