Re: seeking advice

[muppet <scott asofyet org>]

On Mar 29, 2005, at 7:16 PM, Jeff Morgan wrote:

> I am seeking advice on how to address a reported bug.  In
> our MouseEvent class we have a constant defined as TRIPPLE_CLICK.
> Clearly the correct spelling should be TRIPLE_CLICK.  Since this
> constant is public it is part of our public API.  In order to correct
> this mispelled variable I would need to break API stability.  What
> would be the prefered approach to address such a change?

Some time ago, we discovered that gtk2-perl 1.000 was released with 
GtkScrollbar incorrectly bound as Gtk2::ScrollBar.  We changed the 
spelling to Gtk2::Scrollbar in 1.010 (the next unstable series), and 
aliased the old names to the new ones to keep from breaking existing 
code.  Something similar happened for Uint => UInt sometime later; the 
library always returns UInt, but allows either Uint or UInt as input.

For a constant such as TRIPPLE_CLICK, i'd suggest aliasing the old name 
to the new name, and hiding the old name from the documentation (or at 
the very least deprecating it).  Is there a technical reason this 
wouldn't work for you?  (e.g. can't have duplicate enumeration values 
or something like that)

--
If I lived in Teletubby Land, the homicide rate would be four.
  -- elysse