Re: Interface Stability in GNOME

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On Wed, 22 Dec 2004 17:38:16 -0600, Brian Cameron 
>  I think it would be very useful if
> these areas could be better documented, so that the parts that are
> Stable and the parts that are Unstable or Private are be more clearly
> separated.  Would this sort of information be useful to the overall GNOME
> community?  Would it be appropriate to have information like this somewhere
> on d.g.o?

Absolutely.  I started to gather this information at one point to put
into my tutorial
(http://www.gnome.org/~newren/tutorials/developing-with-gnome/html/ch05.html#library-overview),
but I fear part of the information I had may have been wrong and I
wasn't able to get a full listing (well...got too distracted by
hacking on Metacity to do it).  I really did want to list each library
as stable or unstable, as much for my own information as for putting
it in the guide for others.

> However, I'm a bit unsure how to go about collecting and documenting all
> this information.  Should I be talking to each of the module maintainers
> independantly and getting them engaged to get this sort of documentation
> together, or should we just continue talking about this topic on
> desktop-devel until the information is culled out, or another way?

Probably some of each.  I know that doesn't help much, but questions
like this often run the risk of waiting forever for an answer.  I'd
suggest to start collecting whatever information you can, stick it up
in some place that is public, and then continue asking on this list or
bugging individual maintainers and point back to the document as you
do so--when others see an actual document being created (even if it's
only temporary and isn't anywhere close to the format that you want it
to end up in), I think people will chime more quickly with other
information to flesh the document out.

Hope that helps somehow,
Elijah