Re: GNOME ABI review

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2003-08-07 at 09:49, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > ===
> > Third, how would we deploy ABI fixes without breaking the ABI?
> > 
> > I believe we would do it as follows:
> > 
> >  - introduce fixed ABIs in parallel, keeping current ABI working
> > 
> 
> I've been thinking about how the better way to introduce a new mime api,
> and I must admit that I didn't find a really satisfactory way to deal
> with that. A new mime api would involve both cleaning up (or rather
> redesigning) the current C api, and using the freedesktop spec to
> store/retrieve mime type information. 
> So we would have an old mime api, and a new one. If the old mime api
> functions are changed to call the new functions, things will mostly work
> but:
> * the behaviour of the old api will probably change in subtle ways and
> this could bite people using it
> * there are stuff in the old api which doesn't make much sense imo, and
> which I'd like to just drop in the new api
> 
> If the old api code is kept unmodified, there will be two different sets
> of files to store the mime type information, and depending on the api
> used by the app, the user won't see the same mime database, which sucks
> even more than the previous case.
> 
> Any thoughts how this could be handled?

The mimetype -> application part of the current system is really not
used by many apps, so if we design a new system we could either leave
the old one or make it use the new code, and as long as we fixed
gnome-cc, nautilus and panel i think slight problems with the old API
won't matter much.

And for the file -> mimetype part of the new spec I think our current
API is good enough.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a short-sighted misogynist sorceror on a mission from God. She's an 
elegant gypsy vampire from a secret island of warrior women. They fight crime!