Re: GNOME Namespace Management - ARC & GNOME

["Murray Cumming" <murrayc murrayc com>]

> I don't expect the GTK developers to avoid breaking apps that were
> already broken.  That wouldn't be fair or realistic.
>
> Once GTK publishes an API, however, I expect it to never break.  Most of
> the minor stuff I see where it does is because developers don't want the
> "ugliness" of having two sets of functions that do _almost_ the same
> thing, that sort of stuff.

This whole discussion would be a lot easier if you actually said what
you've seen. I deal with 99% of the GTK+ API from gtkmm and I only
remember the following:

1. ABI breakage once in private (though not well-documented as private)
and rarely-used API.

2. API breakage once which did not cause ABI breakage, because the API was
just changed to match the ABI. That was the change to the type of a
CellRender vfunc's parameter.

3. The "construct-only properties" correction of runtime behaviour, that's
been discussed fully already.

In both cases, very very little code was affected.

I am talking about traditional library ABI, because I think you are too.

>  My only advice there is to just suck it up,
> provide both sets of functions, and clean up the cruft in the next major
> release.
[snip]

This is exactly what GTK+ does. They don't need more persuading.

Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com