Re: GTK_FLOATING broken in 2.9?

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Wed, 2005-12-14 at 14:56 -0500, ANDREW PAPROCKI, BLOOMBERG/ 731 LEXIN
wrote:
> Yes, we do really need the floating reference. There is no reason to discourage 
> the code you mentioned when you want to make reusable container objects that 
> have a sane API without requiring the caller to do a bunch of work and 
> potentially introduce bugs. When you are calling your own code, it is not that 
> much to keep track of, but when I write code that is used by 1000 developers it 
> is much easier for me to take care of the reference issues inside the API and 
> make the large group of unknown developers free from unknowingly creating 
> reference counting bugs.

Okay.  So how do we do it without breaking the ABI?

The fact that this ABI is so low down in the stack means that things
become *really hard* in the upper layers.

How do we build applications against a new Glib (without using new
APIs), especially GTK+ applications, and yet be able to run them on
older versions of Glib?

How do we avoid breaking existing apps which use GtkObject's floating
stuff, and have them run unchanged on a newer Glib?

Remember that GNOME 2.14 will use GTK+ *2.8*, but Glib *2.10*.  We can't
break that code.

  Federico