Re: GNOME ABI review

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Mon, 2003-08-11 at 09:51, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 09:42:10AM -0400, Luis Villa wrote: 
> > <devil's advocate>
> > Is it time to admit that GNOME 2.8 should be GNOME 3 and break binary
> > compat for a slew of new/improved developer APIs? Continued indefinite
> > support of APIs we know to be badly broken is not really a great idea,
> > assuming that when we do break compat we do it with very good new APIs
> > (which is currently far from guaranteed, of course.)
> > </>
> 
> Maybe, _if_ we already had all the new ABIs in place, and just went
> GNOME 3 in order to stop shipping the deprecated ones.  All the work
> should still be done incrementally in 2.x releases, though...

Some of the work is going to take longer than the 3-4 months we
currently have for feature work, much like the current gtk release
cycle. So not all of it can be shoehorned into the current release
strategy. I'd love for planning and execution to start on some of those
soon, though.

> you also don't want to go GNOME 3 until the code in the desktop itself 
> has been ported off the deprecated APIs.

Definitely. As with 2.0, for 3.0 we'd want everything to build with
disable-deprecated flags.

FWIW, I don't think 3.0 will be/should be the kind of leap 2.0 was-
we're talking about changing fairly minor stuff when compared to the
massive platform shift that 2.0 was. At some point, though, we've got to
go ahead and seriously ditch the old stuff- it sounds like maintaining
the deprecated APIs for some of these libs is going to be very hard,
given that the 'correct' behavior is so much different than the current
behavior. [see: mime, vfs] 

Luis