Re: Interface Stability in GNOME

[Andrew Sobala <aes gnome org>]

On Wed, 2004-12-22 at 17:18 -0700, Elijah Newren wrote:
> 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.

As an aside, I think the most useful categorisation is probably
Stable/Unstable/Private. So
GDK/GTK/ATK/Pango/GConf/gnome-vfs/libbonobo*/ORBit2 are Stable (surely
anything in the Developer Platform should be stable?),
libgnome-keyring/gstreamer etc. are Unstable, and
libwnck/libegg/eel/gal/libgnome-desktop etc. are Private.

Elijah, I think the "Special Categories" section in your document is
inaccurate; I wouldn't call eel or gnome-desktop a prototype library in
the same way that libegg or gal are (eel is the UI bit of nautiulus,
gnome-desktop is a "useful" library just not intended to be used outside
the Desktop, etc.), but they are all Private to within the GNOME D&DP.
Also some of the unstable libraries aren't unstable "due to lack of
testing or time", but because they are intended to be Private so no-one
wants to invest time into ensuring A[PB]I stability.

Hope that helps,
-- 
Andrew