Re: ARC & GNOME [Was: How we make decisions...]

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Thu, 02 Dec 2004 15:23:16 -0800, Ed Hunter wrote:
> QA - There needs to be some focus on detecting problems in early testing.  The
> sooner you can detect incompatibilities due to interface changes the sooner
> you can get them fixed.  Right now this might be a question of resources which
> potentially Sun or other companies could contribute to.

I guess you don't need any advice on this, but an app suite is a good way
of doing such tests. IE just testing lots of random GTK+ and Gnome apps
grabbed from SourceForge or whatever and checking they don't regress.

> These three areas range from more tactical to more strategic in my mind.
>  Each could be addressed separately or in parallel.  The key thing is
> more clearly understand what areas we're trying to improve (or where we
> want to prevent problems).  For instance, it's clear that some people
> see compatibility focused on the library API while others see it
> encompassing things like file system location and other attributes that
> customers might latch on to.

I think there's consensus that it encompasses any interface that a program
provides. I'm not a GNOME developer though, just some guy with a vested
interest in platform stability.
 
> I'd like to spend some time trying to classify/understand the types of
> issues you all run into.  Is there someone who could give me some
> history on problems that the community has run into in terms of
> compatibility between components in the last six months to a year say?

- GObject construct only properties
- GtkWidget instantiation (?)
- Ongoing menus b0rkage
- File associations changes

That's a list off the top of my head. I only ran into two of these, the
last two, and they were mostly unavoidable. The old systems had to go.

I'd really like you guys to produce a MIG (machine interface guide) to go
with the HIG. I started on something like that, which you can read here:

http://navi.cx/~mike/writing-shared-libraries.html

but it's incomplete due to my pathological lack of time :(

thanks -mike