Re: [GNOME VFS] gob inside gnome-vfs ...

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

n Tue, 2002-06-18 at 11:53, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Joe Shaw <joe ximian com> writes: 
> > Also, I thought the GNOME 2.2 platform libraries were supposed to be
> > backward compatible with GNOME 2.0 (minus removal of deprecated
> > functions):
> 
> The platform is supposed to be 100% ABI compatible for the next couple
> years at least. This means no removal of _any_ functions, _including_
> deprecated functions. i.e. do not do anything that would change the
> library soname.
> 
> No idea if the gnome-vfs changes do that, I'm just clarifying the
> policy, not commenting on this specific case.

The GnomeVFS changes only affect module ABI and source compatibility,
and even then only for a limited number of modules that actually used
the old API. I believe there's precedent for this in GTK already, which
even versions its modules so it can change for 2.2 (GnomeVFS has
traditionally provided progressive versioning with full backward compat,
you just didn't get new functionality on those modules). We're planning
to radically break module ABI for 2.2, but provide a compatibility mode
for loading old-style modules. The new interface will be GObject based,
but old modules should be loadable using a GObject wrapper, so user's
shouldn't be negatively affected.

We plan to keep GnomeVFS 2.0 and 2.2 ABI compatible for client calls,
though we're going to need to do a release of GnomeVFS 2.0.1 with some
padding of several structs to make sure this is really feasible.

-Seth