GNOME 2.0 compatibility and well...the future

[Glynn Foster <glynn foster sun com>]

Heya,
I was just wondering if anything was ever decided with GNOME's future
about compatibility? I know there was some talk at GUADEC about this but
I never remember seeing a full write up of what this would be? It would
be nice to have a solid agreement on what compatibility is and what
GNOME is going to do to preserve this over major, minor and micro
releases. 

I know, I know I'm coming from a corporate background and people are
just going to flame me...but I'm really quite concerned about this and I
think, as an *individual* [yeesh, I still feel the need to say this],
this is quite an important thing to get right if GNOME is to succeed. I
have been staring at one of the Sun architectural documents for most of
the morning and trying to see [if at all possible] where GNOME might fit
into such a thing -
	http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/archreview/interface.html

I know it's probably hard to think much beyond 2.0 at the moment. So in
summary -
	- What is compatibility 
		ie. forwards, backwards, binary, api, user interface etc
	- Where does GNOME fit in with this model over major,minor,micro
	- What are the plans for the future?

So well apologies in advance if I've missed something [or been totally
confused], things just don't seem to be particularly clear right now of
where GNOME is heading and it's level of commitment. From a Sun
perspective, at some stage over the next couple of days we need to start
classifying libraries by this level of compatibility commitment [1] -
which I think, in general, would also be quite helpful for the GNOME
project to have on record [ie dotplan] - if possible :)

Could this be discussed at the next release team meeting? [and/or
Foundation board?]

				See ya,
					Glynn ;)

[1] And I'm sure I'll be bugging you all at some stage ;)