Re: Announcing: Project Ridley

[Enrico Weigelt <weigelt metux de>]

* Rob Adams <readams readams net> schrieb:

<snip>
> I don't really see much reason ever to break ABI for the forseeable 
> future.  There's essentially nothing stopping us from simply leaving 
> deprecated functions in there indefinitely, other than a fairly minor 

Very *bad* idea.

This breaks many applications sooner or later, and someone who's not 
involved in gtk will become really confused by that.

Well, here we see the design of the first place: there is too much
functionality in one library, which someday becomes obsolete, while
the library at all won't. We have no clear interface borders.

as Prof. Wirth already said years over years ago: 

    "make it as simple as possible".


If we had some more libraries - devided by *functionality*, then if 
some functionality (ie. some widget) becomes "obsolete", we simply 
dont maintain this lib anylonger. If these libs have their own
packages, it gets even easier: there is no question about "obsolete" 
stuff - the packages just exist, and if someone wants to work on
them, he just does.

<snip>

> With this in mind, we have to start asking the question of what 
> we think the version numbers for GTK actually mean.

That's the point. AFAIK there's a wide consensous in the OSS world
that jumps between major numbers break at least binary compatibility,
even on source level. So on the other hand binary compatible releases
should not do a major release jump. Major jumps should do something
fundamentally new.

We're not in the commercial world, where people rape version
numbering for marketing.


cu
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