Re: GNOME Namespace Management - ARC & GNOME

[Sander Vesik <sander_traveling yahoo co uk>]

 --- Mike Hearn <mike navi cx> wrote: 
> On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 10:22:24 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > >  Sun's idea
> > >    of ABI compatible means something more like "you can take
> > >    a GNOME 2.0 application package/rpm and install it on a
> > >    system with GNOME 2.6 and it will work.
> > 
> > That's the promise that we make about the Developer Platform. That's been
> > fairly successful. Where it's not, a fuss should be made, ideally during
> > the development cycle.
> 
> It's not, the promise is that the ABI as defined by things like symbol
> naming, structure sizes, on disk formats etc are stable. However, changes
> which break both applications and bindings, including GNOME itself, have
> been made. A fuss was kicked up and ignored.
> 
> You're right, there's a lot that GNOME gets right about interface
> stability. It's a leading light in the free software community in many
> respects. But there's a middle ground here that people ignore: what
> happens when changes are made that break software but fall outside the
> maintainers definition of ABI stability?
> 
> In this case, it's possible to be both ABI stable (by the strict
> definition of ABI) but not semantically stable, or to make changes that
> are technically bugfixes but nonetheless break some significant (number
> of) programs. 
> 
> What I've been trying to figure out is how far Suns
> commitment extends: take the example of GObject construct only properties.
> Would ARC have let this change through, if glib was written by
> Sun?
> 

Provided I'm not confusing the change with some other - it would have cause glib
library major bump so instead of libglib-2.0.so.0 there would now also be
libglib-2.0.so.1 with the .0 version being available for a long time. And this is
not even close to somehow Sun sopecific - you change ABI, you bump the shlib version
so 
that you can parallel install for applications that need it. 

> thanks -mike
> 

=====
Sander

.sigless


		
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