Re: GNOME ABI review

["Curtis C. Hovey" <sinzui cox net>]

On Mon, 2003-08-11 at 09:51, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 09:42:10AM -0400, Luis Villa wrote: 
> > <devil's advocate>
> > Is it time to admit that GNOME 2.8 should be GNOME 3 and break binary
> > compat for a slew of new/improved developer APIs? Continued indefinite
> > support of APIs we know to be badly broken is not really a great idea,
> > assuming that when we do break compat we do it with very good new APIs
> > (which is currently far from guaranteed, of course.)
> > </>
> 
> Maybe, _if_ we already had all the new ABIs in place, and just went
> GNOME 3 in order to stop shipping the deprecated ones.  All the work
> should still be done incrementally in 2.x releases, though...
> you also don't want to go GNOME 3 until the code in the desktop itself 
> has been ported off the deprecated APIs.

I think this is the correct strategy, because it spreads the effects of
change out long enough for developers and companies to plan their their
enhancements without the worry of dependency changes.  In cases where
API changes break ABI, are you suggesting that a replacement lib be
forked (gtkhtml2 vs gtkhtl3 as the best example I can think of)?  If so,
GNOME needs a solid procedure for communicating that one lib needs to
replace another, or that an app should depend upon new an old lib for a
time.

One aspect missing from GNOME is a best practices document about the
preferred means of solving problems to drive developers to the right
libs the right way.  (Then use this document as a start for a new
document that introduces a GNOME development process).

-- 
__C U R T I S  C.  H O V E Y____________________
sinzui cox net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.